Presently his eyes fell on Guy Oscard's face, and again his own
small features expanded into a smile.
"Bad case!" he said, and, turning over, he nestled down into the
pillow, and he had the answer 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.
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