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 ..._"

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
ruin for Fox, for Churchill, for the ministers, and for the men who talk
in railway carriages, for shopkeepers and for the government; it was a
menace to the institutions which hold us to the past, that are our
guarantees for the future. The safety of everything one respected and
believed in was involved in the disclosure of an atrocious fraud, and
the disclosure was in my hands. For that night I had the power of the
press in my keeping. People were waiting for this pronouncement. De
Mersch's last card was his philanthropy; his model state and his happy
natives.

The drone of the presses made the floor under my feet quiver, and the
whole building vibrated as if the earth itself had trembled. I was alone
with my knowledge. Did she know; had she put the power in my hand? But I
was alone, and I was free.

I took up the proof and began to read, slanting the page to the fall of
the light. It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric
of the man there was genuine indignation and pain. There were revolting
details of cruelty to