“The most promising meeting since I encountered Baron Verneux,” murmured O’Hagan, “indefinitely postponed! The Chevalier Camille d’Oysans will be keenly disappointed. He had made all the necessary arrangements for flying the country!” We learned that the police were in quest of Mr. Brandon’s assailant. A call at Mr. Alex. Dewson’s hotel provided a surprise. “I shall not chastise him,” explained my friend. “The depths of his ignorance are pathetic. But I feel it to be my duty to tell him that he is a disgrace to the great nation which includes in its roll of honour the name of Edmond O’Hagan.” Mr. Dewson could receive no visitors. Captain O’Hagan swept the servant aside and waved to me to follow. It needs something more than a verbal rebuff to exclude O’Hagan—something in the nature of a double-barred iron door or a squad with fixed bayonets. My friend honoured Mr. Dewson’s apartment. And Mr. Dewson, a heavily bandaged figure hunched up in an armchair by the fire, observed our intrusion with his one visible eye. “Raymond,” said O’Hagan, as he focussed this crippled apparition, “the ‘Trooper’ has forestalled us again!” “You bet he has, Captain!” whispered a weak voice. O’Hagan turned to me. “In the thoroughness of Mr. Belcher’s method,” he said, “I find something almost admirable, Raymond! The ‘Trooper’ is a loss to the service.” That he was a loss which speeding Time should rectify, we, being but human, could not foresee. But is it not history how Sergeant Belcher, at a spot not a hundred miles from Ypres, acquired the most coveted distinction in the gift of His Britannic Majesty for rescuing a badly wounded officer under heavy fire? And is it not written in deathless annals that the name of that gallant officer was Captain the Hon. Bernard O’Hagan, V.C., D.S.O.? EXPLOIT THE FOURTH. HE BURIES AN OLD LOVE. EXPLOIT THE FOURTH. HE BURIES AN OLD LOVE. I. THE LONELY LADY. That class distinctions are invidious, that one man is as good as another, are theorems which find no place in O’Hagan’s philosophy. His whole life is a protest against such propositions. He complains that there is no badge peculiar to the gentleman; that the latest morning-coat from Savile Row is colourably imitated, and within a week, by Rye Lane, Peckham. Hence, I take it, his broad, black ribbon with the dependent monocle, his purple-lined cloak. These things are not imitated, and for a simple reason. O’Hagan’s cloak makes no appeal to Peckham, and leaves even Hampstead cold. O’Hagan holds that to tolerate scurrility from the lower classes is to encourage rebellion, and maintains that the French Revolution was brought about, not by the vices of the nobility, but by its weakness. “Spare the axe and spoil the people,” he says.