reporter looked at him
suspiciously.

'We have to consider our readers,' he replied with some asperity.

'By the way, what paper do you represent?'

The reporter hesitated a little.

'The _Evening Meteor_,' he admitted reluctantly, keeping a watchful eye
upon his questioner. He saw the lips join in a hard line, and began to
wonder whether, after all, the need for diplomacy had passed.

'I begin to appreciate the meaning of journalistic enterprise,' said
Drake. 'Your editor makes a violent attack upon me, and then sends a
member of his staff to interview me the moment I set foot in England.'

'You hardly take the correct view, if I may say so. Our chief when he
made the attacks acted under a sense of responsibility, and he thought it
only fair that you should have the earliest possible opportunity of
making your defence.'

'I beg your pardon,' replied Drake gravely. 'Your chief is the most
considerate of men, and I trust that his equity will leave him a margin
of profit, only I don't seem to feel that I need make any defence. I have
no objection to be interviewed, as I told you, but you must make it clear
that I intend nothing in the way of apology. Is that understood?'

The pressman agreed, and made a note of the proviso.

'There is another point. I have seen nothing of the paper necessarily for
the last few weeks. The _Meteor_ has, I suppose, continued its--crusade,
shall we call it?--but on what lines exactly I am, of course, ignorant.
It will be better, consequently, that you should put questions and I
answer them, upon this condition, however,--that all reference is omitted
to any point on which I am unwilling to speak.'

The reporter demurred, but, seeing that Drake was obdurate, he was
compelled to give way.

'The entire responsibility of the expedition rests with me,' Drake
explained, 'but there were others concerned in it. You might trench upon
private matters which only affect them.'

He watched the questions with the vigilance of a counsel on behalf of a
client undergoing cross-examination, but they were directed solely to the
elucidation of the disputed point whether Drake had or had not, while a
captain in the service of the Matanga Republic, attacked a settlement of
Arab slave-dealers within the zone of a British Protectorate. The editor
of the _Meteor_ believed that he had, and strenuously believed it--in the
interests of his shareholders. Drake, on the other hand, and the Colonial
Office, i