“Pretty thick that,” Soane said.  He was looking back at me from the cupboard he had opened.  “I’ve rubbed it in, too ... there’ll be hats on the green to-morrow.”  He had his head inside the cupboard, and his voice came to me hollowly.  He extracted a large bottle with a gilt-foiled neck.

“Won’t it upset the apple cart to-morrow,” he said, very loudly; “won’t it?”

His voice acted on me as the slight shake upon a phial full of waiting chemicals; crystallised them suddenly with a little click.  Everything suddenly grew very clear to me.  I suddenly understood that all the tortuous intrigue hinged upon what I did in the next few minutes.  It rested with me now to stretch out my hand to that button in the wall or to let the whole world—­“the ... the probity ... that sort of thing,” she had said—­fall to pieces.  The drone of the presses continued to make itself felt like the quiver of a suppressed emotion.  I might stop them or I might not.  It rested with me.

Everybody was in my hands; they were quite small.  If I let the thing go on, they would be done for utterly, and the new era would begin.

Soane had got hold of a couple of long-stalked glasses.  They clinked together whilst he searched the cupboard for something.

“Eh, what?” he said.  “It is pretty strong, isn’t it?  Ought to shake out some of the supporters, eh?  Bill comes on to-morrow ... do for that, I should think.”  He wanted a corkscrew very badly.

But that was precisely it—­it would “shake out some of the supporters,” and give Gurnard his patent excuse.  Churchill, I knew, would stick to his line, the saner policy.  But so many of the men who had stuck to Churchill would fall away now, and Gurnard, of course, would lead them to his own triumph.

It was a criminal verdict.  Callan had gone out as a commissioner—­with a good deal of drum-beating.  And this was his report, this shriek.  If it sounded across the house-tops—­if I let it—­good-by to the saner policy and to Churchill.  It did not make any difference that Churchill’s was the saner policy, because there was no one in the nation sane enough to see it.  They wanted purity in high places, and here was a definite, criminal indictment against de Mersch.  And de Mersch would—­in a manner of speaking, have to be lynched, policy or no policy.

She wanted this, and in all the earth she was the only desirable thing.  If I thwarted her—­she would ... what would she do now?  I looked at Soane.

“What would happen if I stopped the presses?” I asked.  Soane was twisting his corkscrew in the wire of the champagne bottle.

It was fatal; I could see nothing on earth but her.  What else was there in the world.  Wine?  The light of the sun?  The wind on the heath?  Honour!  My God, what was honour to me if I could see nothing but her on earth?  Would honour or wine or sun or wind ever give me what she could give?  Let them go.