u'll have to
do is to take the rooms and pay for them. I'm sorry I can't be of
any further use to you, but I'm pressed for time to-day. So now,
good-morning."

As for the stranger, he turned up the path through the lodging-house
garden with curious misgivings. His heart failed him. It was half-past
three by mean solar time for that particular longitude. Then why had
this young man said so briskly, "Good morning," at 3.30 P.M., as if on
purpose to deceive him? Was he laying a trap? Was this some wile and
guile of the English medicine-men?

II

Next day was (not unnaturally) Sunday. At half-past ten in the morning,
according to his wont, Philip Christy was seated in the drawing-room at
his sister's house, smooth silk hat in gloved hand, waiting for Frida
and her husband, Robert Monteith, to go to church with him. As he sat
there, twiddling his thumbs, or beating the devil's tattoo on the red
Japanese table, the housemaid entered. "A gentleman to see you, sir,"
she said, handing Philip a card. The young man glanced at it curiously.
A visitor to call at such an early hour!--and on Sunday morning too! How
extremely odd! This was really most irregular!

So he looked down at the card with a certain vague sense of inarticulate
disapproval. But he noticed at the same time it was finer and clearer
and more delicately engraved than any other card he had ever yet come
across. It bore in simple unobtrusive letters the unknown name, "Mr.
Bertram Ingledew."

Though he had never heard it before, name and engraving both tended to
mollify Philip's nascent dislike. "Show the gentleman in, Martha," he
said in his most grandiose tone; and the gentleman entered.

Philip started at sight of him. It was his friend the Alien. Philip
was quite surprised to see his madman of last night; and what was more
disconcerting still, in the self-same grey tweed home-spun suit he had
worn last evening. Now, nothing can be more gentlemanly, don't you know,
than a grey home-spun, IN its proper place; but its proper place Philip
Christy felt was certainly NOT in a respectable suburb on a Sunday
morning.

"I beg your pardon," he said frigidly, rising from his seat with his
sternest official air--the air he was wont to assume in the anteroom at
the office when outsiders called and wished to interview his chief
"on important public business." "To what may I owe the honour of this
visit?" For he did not care to be hunted up in his sister's house