He grunted in acquiescence.  I left him lying on the sofa, drinking the coffee.  I had tenderly arranged the lights for him as Fox had arranged them the night before.  As I went out to get my dinner I was comfortably aware of him, holding the slips close to his muddled eyes and philosophically damning the nature of things.

When I returned, Soane, from his sofa, said something that I did not catch—­something about Callan and his article.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I answered, “don’t worry me.  Have some more coffee and stick to Cal’s line of argument.  That’s what Fox said.  I’m not responsible.”

“Deuced queer,” Soane muttered.  He began to scribble with a pencil.  From the tone of his voice I knew that he had reached the precise stage at which something brilliant—­the real thing of its kind—­might be expected.

Very late Soane finished his leader.  He looked up as he wrote the last word.

“I’ve got it written,” he said.  “But ...  I say, what the deuce is up?  It’s like being a tall clock with the mainspring breaking, this.”

I rang the bell for someone to take the copy down.

“Your metaphor’s too much for me, Soane,” I said.

“It’s appropriate all the way along,” he maintained, “if you call me a mainspring.  I’ve been wound up and wound up to write old de Mersch and his Greenland up—­and it’s been a tight wind, these days, I tell you.  Then all of a sudden ...”

A boy appeared and carried off the copy.

“All of a sudden,” Soane resumed, “something gives—­I suppose something’s given—­and there’s a whirr-rr-rr and the hands fly backwards and old de Mersch and Greenland bump to the bottom, like the weights.”

The boom of the great presses was rattling the window frames.  Soane got up and walked toward one of the cupboards.

“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 Groenlandais—­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 ...”