"Dry work," he said; "but the simile's just, isn't it?"

I gave one swift step toward the bell-button beside the desk. The proof
of Callan's article, from which Soane had been writing, lay a crumpled
white streamer on the brown wood of Fox's desk. I made toward it. As I
stretched out my hand the solution slipped into my mind, coming with no
more noise than that of a bullet; impinging with all the shock and
remaining with all the pain. I had remembered the morning, over there in
Paris, when she had told me that she had invited one of de Mersch's
lieutenants to betray him by not concealing from Callan the real
horrors of the Systeme Groënlandais--flogged, butchered, miserable
natives, the famines, the vices, diseases, and the crimes. There came
suddenly before my eyes the tall narrow room in my aunt's house, the
opening of the door and her entry, followed by that of the woebegone
governor of a province--the man who was to show Callan things--with his
grating "_Cest entendu ..._"

I remembered the scene distinctly; her words; her looks; my utter
unbelief. I remembered, too, that it had not saved me from a momentary
sense of revolt against that inflexible intention of a treachery which
was to be another step toward the inheritance of the earth. I had
rejected the very idea, and here it had come; it was confronting me with
all its meaning and consequences. Callan _had_ been shown things he had
not been meant to see, and had written the truth as he had seen it. His
article was a small thing in itself, but he had been sent out there with
tremendous flourishes of de Mersch's trumpets. He was _the_ man who
could be believed. De Mersch's supporters had practically said: "If he
condemns us we are indeed damned." And now that the condemnation had
come, it meant ruin, as it seemed to me, for everybody I had known,
worked for, seen, or heard of, during the last year of my life. It was