‘Very good.  What am I to do with him?’

‘Don’t you worry,’ said Penfentenyou.  ‘He’ll do it.’

And when Mr. Lingnam appeared half-an-hour later with the Agent-General for Penfentenyou’s Dominion, he did just that.

He advanced across the lawn eloquent as all the tides.  He said he had been observing to the Agent-General that it was both politically immoral and strategically unsound that forty-four million people should bear the entire weight of the defences of Our mighty Empire, but, as he had observed (here the Agent-General evaporated), we stood now upon the threshold of a new era in which the self-governing and self-respecting (bis) Dominions would rightly and righteously, as co-partners in Empery, shoulder their share of any burden which the Pan-Imperial Council of the Future should allot.  The Agent-General was already arranging for drinks with Penfentenyou at the other end of the garden.  Mr. Lingnam swept me on to the most remote bench and settled to his theme.

We dined at eight.  At nine Mr. Lingnam was only drawing abreast of things Imperial.  At ten the Agent-General, who earns his salary, was shamelessly dozing on the sofa.  At eleven he and Penfentenyou went to bed.  At midnight Mr. Lingnam brought down his big-bellied despatch box with the newspaper clippings and set to federating the Empire in earnest.  I remember that he had three alternative plans.  As a dealer in words, I plumped for the resonant third—­’Reciprocally co-ordinated Senatorial Hegemony’—­which he then elaborated in detail for three-quarters of an hour.  At half-past one he urged me to have faith and to remember that nothing mattered except the Idea.  Then he retired to his room, accompanied by one glass of cold water, and I went into the dawn-lit garden and prayed to any Power that might be off duty for the blood of Mr. Lingnam, Penfentenyou, and the Agent-General.

To me, as I have often observed elsewhere, the hour of earliest dawn is fortunate, and the wind that runs before it has ever been my most comfortable counsellor.

‘Wait!’ it said, all among the night’s expectant rosebuds.  ’To-morrow is also a day.  Wait upon the Event!’

I went to bed so at peace with God and Man and Guest that when I waked I visited Mr. Lingnam in pyjamas, and he talked to me Pan-Imperially for half-an-hour before his bath.  Later, the Agent-General said he had letters to write, and Penfentenyou invented a Cabinet crisis in his adored Dominion which would keep him busy with codes and cables all the forenoon.  But I said firmly, ’Mr. Lingnam wishes to see a little of the country round here.  You are coming with us in your own car.’

‘It’s a hired one,’ Penfentenyou objected.

‘Yes.  Paid for by me as a taxpayer,’ I replied.

‘And yours has a top, and the weather looks thundery,’ said the Agent-General.  ‘Ours hasn’t a wind-screen.  Even our goggles were hired.’