On this point of justification he was peculiarly sensitive. Various Englishmen, soldiers sent out on secret missions to the fringes of the areas of his activities, had questioned many of his statements, both in the book and in descriptive articles which he had written for newspapers and other periodicals, and asked for proofs. And he had replied, most cogently, that the sphere of the Russian Secret Service in which he was employed was, of necessity, beyond the ken of the secret service of any other Power in Europe, and that official proofs were lost in the social and political disintegration of Russia. One man, a great man, speaking with unquestionable authority, silenced the horde of cavillers as far as events prior to 1917 were concerned. But there were still some who barked annoyingly at his heels. Proofs, of course, he had none to give. How can a man give proofs when he is cast up, practically naked, on the coast of England? He must be believed or not. And it was the haunting terror of this sensitive boy of genius, whose face and eyes bore the ineffaceable marks of suffering, that he should lose the credit which he had gained. At all hazards he must allow no doubts to arise in the mind of Olivia. To fight them down he would do all manner of extravagant things. He regretted the pusillanimous tameness of his late opponent. If the man had only picked himself up and given battle! If only there had been half a dozen abductors or insulters instead of one! His spirits (at seven o’clock) sank at the logical conclusion that the conventional conditions of post-war civilized life afforded a meagre probability of the recurrence of such another opportunity. He had the temperament of those whose hunger is only whetted by triumph, to whom attainment only gives vision of new heights. When, after tossing sleepless in his bed, he rose and dressed at nine, he had decided that, in knocking down a mere mass of unresisting flesh, he had played a part almost inglorious, such as any stay-at-home _embusqué_ could have played. By not one jot or tittle did his act advance the credibility of his story. And on his story alone could he found his hopes of finding favour in her marvellous eyes. Of the touch of genius that inspired his literary work he thought little. At this stage of his career he was filled with an incredulous wonder at his possession of a knack which converted a page of scribble into a cheque upon a bank. His writing meant money. Not money, wealth, on the grand scale; but money to keep him as a modest gentleman on the social grade to which he had attained, and to save him from the detested livery of the chauffeur. The story which he was telling in the new book was but a means to this end. The story which he had told was life itself. Nay, now it was more: it was love itself; it was a girl who was more than life.