to the many questions that puzzled his small
brain.

CHAPTER XL. SIR JOHN'S LAST CARD

'Tis better playing with a lion's whelp
Than with an old one dying.

As through an opera runs the rhythm of one dominant air, so through
men's lives there rings a dominant note, soft in youth, strong in
manhood, and soft again in old age. But it is always there, and whether
soft in the gentler periods, or strong amidst the noise and clang of the
perihelion, it dominates always and gives its tone to the whole life.

The dominant tone of Sir John Meredith's existence had been the high
clear note of battle. He had always found something or some one to fight
from the very beginning, and now, in his old age, he was fighting still.
His had never been the din and crash of warfare by sword and cannon,
but the subtler, deeper combat of the pen. In his active days he had
got through a vast amount of work--that unchronicled work of the Foreign
Office which never comes, through the cheap newspapers, to the voracious
maw of a chattering public. His name was better known on the banks of
the Neva, the Seine, the Bosphorus, or the swift-rolling Iser than by
the Thames; and grim Sir John was content to have it so.

His face had never been public property, the comic papers had never
used his personality as a peg upon which to hang their ever-changing
political principles. But he had always been "there," as he himself
vaguely put it. That is to say, he had always been at the back--one
of those invisible powers of the stage by whose command the scene is
shifted, the lights are lowered for the tragedy, or the gay music plays
on the buffoon. Sir John had no sympathy with a generation of men and
women who would rather be laughed at and despised than unnoticed. He
belonged to an age wherein it was held better to be a gentleman than
the object of a cheap and evanescent notoriety--and he was at once
the despair and the dread of newspaper interviewers, enterprising
publishers, and tuft-hunters.

He was so little known out of his own select circle that the porters in
Euston Station asked each other in vain who the old swell waiting for
the four o'clock "up" from Liverpool could be. The four o'clock was,
moreover, not the first express which Sir John had met that day. His
stately carriage-and-pair had pushed its way into the crowd of smaller
and humbler vehicular fry earlier in the afternoon, and on that occasion
also the old gentleman h