their backs,
which.... It was like the house that Jack built; I wondered who Jack
was. That was it, who was Jack? It all hinged upon that.

"Why, yes," I said. "It seems rather neat."

"Of course," Fox wandered on, "you are wondering why the deuce I tell
you all this. Fact is, you'd hear it all if I didn't, and a good deal
more that isn't true besides. But I believe you're the sort of chap to
respect a confidence."

I didn't rise to the sentiment. I knew as well as he did that he was
bamboozling me, that he was, as he said, only telling me--not the truth,
but just what I should hear everywhere. I did not bear him any ill-will;
it was part of the game, that. But the question was, who was Jack? It
might be Fox himself.... There might, after all, be some meaning in the
farrago of nonsense that that fantastic girl had let off upon me. Fox
really and in a figure of speech such as she allowed herself, might be
running a team consisting of the Duc de Mersch and Mr. Churchill.

CHAPTER FOUR

He might really be backing a foreign, philanthropic ruler and
State-founder, and a British Foreign Minister, against the rather
sinister Chancellor of the Exchequer that Mr. Gurnard undoubtedly was.
It might suit him; perhaps he had shares in something or other that
depended on the success of the Duc de Mersch's Greenland Protectorate. I
knew well enough, you must remember, that Fox was a big man--one of
those big men that remain permanently behind the curtain, perhaps
because they have a certain lack of comeliness of one sort or another
and don't look well on the stage itself. And I understood now that if he
had abandoned--as he had done--half a dozen enterprises of his own for
the sake of the _Hour_, it must be because it was very well worth his
while. It was not merely a question of the editorship of a paper; there
was something very much bigger in the background. My Dimensionist young
lady, again, might have other shares that depended on the Chancellor of
the Exchequer's blocking the way. In that way she might very well talk
allegorically of herself as in alliance with Gurnard against Fox and
Churchill. I was at sea in that sort of thing--but I understood
vaguely that something of the sort was remotely possible.

I didn't feel called upon to back out of it on that account, yet I very
decidedly wished that the thing could have been otherwise. For myself, I
came into the matter with clean hands--and I was going to keep my h