As they parted, the stranger spoke again, still more at sea.  “And are there any special ceremonies to be gone through on taking up lodgings?” he asked quite gravely.  “Any religious rites, I mean to say?  Any poojah or so forth?  That is,” he went on, as Philip’s smile broadened, “is there any taboo to be removed or appeased before I can take up my residence in the apartments?”

By this time Philip was really convinced he had to do with a madman—­perhaps a dangerous lunatic.  So he answered rather testily, “No, certainly not; how absurd! you must see that’s ridiculous.  You’re in a civilised country, not among Australian savages.  All you’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 at a moment’s notice by a most casual acquaintance, whom he suspected of being an escaped lunatic.