Opposite Number?"

Penfentenyou described him.

"Hush! You mustn't talk like that!" I shuddered. "He's one of the best
of good fellows. You should meet him socially."

"I've done that too," he said. "Have you?"

"Heaven forbid!" I cried; "but that's the proper thing to say."

"Oh, he said all the proper things. Only I thought as this was England
that they'd more or less have the hang of all the--general hang-together
of my Idea. But I had to explain it from the beginning."

"Ah! They'd probably mislaid the papers," I said, and I told him
the story of a three-million pound insurrection caused by a deputy
Under-Secretary sitting upon a mass of green-labelled correspondence
instead of reading it.

"I wonder it doesn't happen every week," the answered. "D'you mind my
having the Agent-General to dinner again tonight? I'll wire, and he can
motor down."

The Agent-General arrived two hours later, a patient and expostulating
person, visibly torn between the pulling Devil of a rampant Colony,
and the placid Baker of a largely uninterested England. But with
Penfentenyou behind him he had worked; for he told us that Lord
Lundie--the Law Lord was the final authority on the legal and
constitutional aspects of the Great Idea, and to him it must be
referred.

"Good Heavens alive!" thundered Penfentenyou. "I told you to get that
settled last Christmas."

"It was the middle of the house-party season," said the Agent-General
mildly. "Lord Lundie's at Credence Green now--he spends his holidays
there. It's only forty miles off."

"Shan't I disturb his Holiness?" said Penfentenyou heavily. "Perhaps
'my sort of questions,"' he snorted, "mayn't be discussed except at
midnight."

"Oh, don't be a child," I said.

"What this country needs," said Penfentenyou, "is--" and for ten minutes
he trumpeted rebellion.

"What you need is to pay for your own protection," I cut in when he
drew breath, and I showed him a yellowish paper, supplied gratis by
Government, which is called Schedule D. To my merciless delight he had
never seen the thing before, and I completed my victory over him and
all the Colonies with a Brassey's "Naval Annual" and a "Statesman's Year
Book."

The Agent-General interposed with agent-generalities (but they were
merely provocateurs) about Ties of Sentiment.

"They be blowed!" said Penfentenyou. "What's the good of sentiment
towards a Kindergarten?"

"Quite so. Ties of common funk are the things that bind u