"Prior to your—" here Daniel was about to say something like terrifying spasm of dementia but corrected himself: "change of career, twenty years ago, you were only able to work with such modest samples of gold as you could buy from local sources. Your appointment to the Mint—combined with the policies you have adopted there—have made the Tower of London the bottle-neck through which all the world’s gold flows, and put you in a position to dip your finger into that flow at will, sampling and testing the gold of many different lands—am I getting it right?"