passionate about it?"

Horne Fisher looked at the young man with a baffling expression.

"I suppose," he said, "it's because I'm a Little Englander."

"I can never make out what you mean by that sort of thing," answered
Boyle, doubtfully.

"Do you think England is so little as all that?" said Fisher, with a
warmth in his cold voice, "that it can't hold a man across a few
thousand miles. You lectured me with a lot of ideal patriotism, my
young friend; but it's practical patriotism now for you and me, and
with no lies to help it. You talked as if everything always went
right with us all over the world, in a triumphant crescendo
culminating in Hastings. I tell you everything has gone wrong with
us here, except Hastings. He was the one name we had left to conjure
with, and that mustn't go as well, no, by God! It's bad enough that
a gang of infernal Jews should plant us here, where there's no
earthly English interest to serve, and all hell beating up against
us, simply because Nosey Zimmern has lent money to half the Cabinet.
It's bad enough that an old pawnbroker from Bagdad should make us
fight his battles; we can't fight with our right hand cut off. Our
one score was Hastings and his victory, which was really somebody
else's victory. Tom Travers has to suffer, and so have you."

Then, after a moment's silence, he pointed toward the bottomless
well and said, in a quieter tone:

"I told you that I didn't believe in the philosophy of the Tower of
Aladdin. I don't believe in the Empire growing until it reaches the
sky; I don't believe in the Union Jack going up and up eternally
like the Tower. But if you think I am going to let the Union Jack go
down and down eternally, like the bottomless well, down into the
blackness of the bottomless pit, down in defeat and derision, amid
the jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry--no I won't, and
that's flat; not if the Chancellor were blackmailed by twenty
millionaires with their gutter rags, not if the Prime Minister
married twenty Yankee Jewesses, not if Woodville and Carstairs had
shares in twenty swindling mines. If the thing is really tottering,
God help it, it mustn't be we who tip it over."

Boyle was regarding him with a bewilderment that was almost fear,
and had even a touch of distaste.

"Somehow," he said, "there seems to be something rather horrid about
the things you know."

"There is," replied Horne Fisher. "I am not at all pleased with my
small stock of