t's a society," he explained, standing
ponderously by the side of the arm-chair, "not anarchist in principle,
but open to all shades of revolutionary opinion."

"Are you in it?"

"One of the Vice-Presidents," Mr Verloc breathed out heavily; and the
First Secretary of the Embassy raised his head to look at him.

"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself," he said incisively. "Isn't
your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in
blunt type on this filthy paper eh? Why don't you do something? Look
here. I've this matter in hand now, and I tell you plainly that you will
have to earn your money. The good old Stott-Wartenheim times are over.
No work, no pay."

Mr Verloc felt a queer sensation of faintness in his stout legs. He
stepped back one pace, and blew his nose loudly.

He was, in truth, startled and alarmed. The rusty London sunshine
struggling clear of the London mist shed a lukewarm brightness into the
First Secretary's private room; and in the silence Mr Verloc heard
against a window-pane the faint buzzing of a fly--his first fly of the
year--heralding better than any number of swallows the approach of
spring. The useless fussing of that tiny energetic organism affected
unpleasantly this big man threatened in his indolence.

In the pause Mr Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of disparaging
remarks concerning Mr Verloc's face and figure. The fellow was
unexpectedly vulgar, heavy, and impudently unintelligent. He looked
uncommonly like a master plumber come to present his bill. The First
Secretary of the Embassy, from his occasional excursions into the field
of American humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic
as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency.

This was then the famous and trusty secret agent, so secret that he was
never designated otherwise but by the symbol [delta] in the late Baron
Stott-Wartenheim's official, semi-official, and confidential
correspondence; the celebrated agent [delta], whose warnings had the
power to change the schemes and the dates of royal, imperial, grand ducal
journeys, and sometimes caused them to be put off altogether! This
fellow! And Mr Vladimir indulged mentally in an enormous and derisive
fit of merriment, partly at his own astonishment, which he judged naive,
but mostly at the expense of the universally regretted Baron
Stott-Wartenheim. His late Excellency, whom the august favour of his