character, but crushed mercilessly every one who menaced his
position. He stood alone, and a little mysterious; his own party was
afraid of him.

Gurnard was quite hidden from me by table ornaments; the Duc de Mersch
glowed with light and talked voluminously, as if he had for years and
years been starved of human society. He glowed all over, it seemed to
me. He had a glorious beard, that let one see very little of his florid
face and took the edge away from an almost non-existent forehead and
depressingly wrinkled eyelids. He spoke excellent English, rather
slowly, as if he were forever replying to toasts to his health. It
struck me that he seemed to treat Churchill in nuances as an inferior,
whilst for the invisible Gurnard, he reserved an attitude of nervous
self-assertion. He had apparently come to dilate on the _Systeme
Groenlandais_, and he dilated. Some mistaken persons had insinuated that
the _Systeme_ was neither more nor less than a corporate exploitation of
unhappy Esquimaux. De Mersch emphatically declared that those _mistaken_
people were _mistaken_, declared it with official finality. The
Esquimaux were not unhappy. I paid attention to my dinner, and let the
discourse on the affairs of the Hyperborean Protectorate lapse into an
unheeded murmur. I tried to be the simple amanuensis at the feast.

Suddenly, however, it struck me that de Mersch was talking at me; that
he had by the merest shade raised his intonation. He was dilating upon
the immense international value of the proposed Trans-Greenland Railway.
Its importance to British trade was indisputable; even the opposition
had no serious arguments to offer. It was the obvious duty of the
British Government to give the financial guarantee. He would not insist
upon the moral aspect of the work--it was unnecessary. Progress,
improvement, civilisation, a little less evil in the world--more light!
It was our duty not to count the cost of humanising a lower race.
Besides, the thing would pay like another Suez Canal. Its terminus and
the British coaling station would be on the west coast of the island....
I knew the man was talking at me--I wondered why.

Suddenly he turned his glowing countenance full upon me.

"I think I must have met a member of your family," he said. The solution
occurred to me. I was a journalist, he a person interested in a railway
that he wished the Government to back in some way or another. His
attempts to capture my suffrage no longer