“Pamela is quite an unusual name for a girl of the lower classes. In what way is Parkins interested?” The mild eye of Mr. J. Crichton smouldered into faint flame. “The lower classes! The——” “I asked you a question.” Mr. Crichton hesitated, glanced around his shop—his _own_ shop—noted that his pugilistic friend was entering the door with an air of business-like truculence, and took his elusive courage in both hands. “I decline to be cross-examined—by you—or—by——” Mr. Parkins closed the shop-door, bolted it, and pulled down the blue blind. He began deliberately to remove his coat. “Half a mo, Mr. C.,” he interrupted in a quivering voice. “Sorry to put you out, but it’s got to be done. I’ll smash ’im; then you can call for the police and give ’im in charge!” O’Hagan raised the monocle swung upon the broad black ribbon, and holding it at some distance from his right eye, surveyed the speaker. “I thought I forbade you to address me?” he remarked icily. Parkins, removing a collar and shirt-front combined, began to whistle. “I’ll show you comin’ buttin’ in and runnin’ after respectable girls!” he announced hoarsely. “_Blighter!_” O’Hagan dropped the monocle and laid his cane upon the counter. At the moment that Parkins stood upright and squared his chest, the Captain snatched up Mr. Crichton’s day-book—a heavy, leather-bound volume—and hurled it full at the pugilist’s head. One of the precepts of the Higher Jiu-jitsu, or “Art of Gentle Thought,” he will tell you, is to avail yourself of any missile within reach. His aim, then, is deadly. The day-book struck Parkins edgewise across the face, felling him like a stricken bullock—felling him utterly, brutally. He crashed into the corner by the door—and lay still. (“A dreadful blow was struck at every gentleman when the sword was taken from him,” O’Hagan will say. “One cannot soil one’s gloves with the blood of churls.”) “If you compel me to deal with you,” said the Captain, as Parkins returned to groaning consciousness of his injuries, “I shall cut your ears off!” Do not judge my friend harshly. He was born three centuries too late, that is all. The claim of Democracy to an equality with Aristocracy is as unintelligible to him as it must have been to Denis O’Hagan, who upheld the Stuart cause whilst he had breath, and died at last like a gentleman at Worcester, having demonstrated his distaste for plebeian company by personally dispatching seven Roundheads. Or perhaps the autocratic soul of Patrick O’Hagan lives again within Bernard. This member of the family, sometime of the _Mousquetaires du roi_, narrowly escaped the Bastille for decapitating a Paris grocer who insulted a lady and attaching the erring tradesman’s head to his own shop-sign. Parkins dizzily strove to get upon his feet. Mr. Crichton, trembling, was seeking to reach the telephone. “Sit down, Mr. Crichton,” directed O’Hagan, turning the monocle upon him. “This is my shop—and that’s one o’ my friends——”