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 had indulged in a grave promenade upon the platform. He was walking up and down there now, with his hand in the small of his back, where of late he had been aware of a constant aching pain. He was very upright, however, and supremely unconscious of the curiosity aroused by his presence in the mind of the station canaille. His lips were rather more troublesome than usual, and his keen eyes twinkled with a suppressed excitement. In former days there had been no one equal to him in certain diplomatic crises where it was a question of brow-beating suavely the uppish representative of some foreign State. No man could then rival him in the insolently aristocratic school of diplomacy which England has made her own. But in his most dangerous crisis he had never been restless, apprehensive, pessimistic, as he was at this moment. And after all it was a very simple matter that had brought him there. It was merely the question of meeting a man as if by accident, and then afterwards making that man do certain things required of him. Moreover, the man was only Guy Oscard--learned if you will in forest craft, but a mere child in the hand of so old a diplomatist as Sir John Meredith.