Sir Lucius Chesney, who was rarely disturbed by anything, showed on this occasion a fussy solicitude about his trunks and boxes; nor was he appeased until he had seen them all on a truck, waiting for the inspection of the customs officers.  Mr. Hawker, slouching along the pier with his ulster collar turned up and his hat well down over his eyes, observed the military-looking gentleman and then the prominent white-lettered name on the luggage.  He passed on after an instant’s hesitation.

“Sir Lucius Chesney!” he muttered.  “It’s queer, but I’ll swear I’ve heard that name before.  Now, where could it have been?  The bloke’s face ain’t familiar—­I never ran across him.  But the name?  Ah, hang me if I don’t think I’ve got it!”

Mr. Hawker did not get into the London train, though his goal was the metropolis.  He left the pier, and as he walked with apparent carelessness through the town—­he had no luggage—­he took an occasional crafty survey over his shoulder, as a man might do who feared that he was being shadowed.  When the train rattled out of Dover he was in the public bar of a tavern not far from the Lord Warden Hotel, fortifying himself with a brandy-and-soda after the rough passage across the Channel.  Meanwhile, Sir Lucius Chesney, seated in a first-class carriage, was regarding with an ecstatic expression the one piece of luggage that he had refused to trust to the van.  This was a flat leather case, and it contained something of much greater importance than the dress-suit for which it was intended.

Dover was honored by Mr. Hawker’s presence until three o’clock in the afternoon, and he took advantage of the intervening couple of hours to eat a hearty meal and to count his scanty store of money, after which he dozed on a bench in the restaurant until roused by a waiter.  There are two railway stations in the town, and he chose the inner one.  He found an empty third-class compartment, and his relief was manifest when the train pulled out.  He produced a short briar-root pipe, and stuffed it with the last shreds of French Caporal tobacco that remained in his pouch.

“Give me the shag of old England,” he said to himself, as he puffed away with a poor relish and watched the flying sides of the deep railway cutting.  “This is no class—­it’s cabbage leaf soaked in juice.  I wonder if I ain’t a fool to come back!  But it can’t be helped—­there was nothing to be picked up abroad, after that double stroke of hard luck.  And there’s no place like London!  I’ll be all right if I dodge the ferrets at Victoria.  For the last ten years they’ve only known me clean-shaven or with a heavy beard, and this mustache and the rig will puzzle them a bit.  Yes, I ought to pass for a foreign gent come across to back horses.”