“With pleasure,” Philip replied, quite delighted at the chance of solving the mystery of where the stranger had dropped from.  “I’m going that way myself, and can take you past her door.  It’s only a few steps.  Then you’re a stranger in England?”

The newcomer smiled a curious self-restrained smile.  He was both young and handsome.  “Yes, I’m a stranger in your England,” he answered, gravely, in the tone of one who wishes to avoid an awkward discussion.  “In fact, an Alien.  I only arrived here this very morning.”

“From the Continent?” Philip inquired, arching his eyebrows slightly.

The stranger smiled again.  “No, not from the Continent,” he replied, with provoking evasiveness.

“I thought you weren’t a foreigner,” Philip continued in a blandly suggestive voice.  “That is to say,” he went on, after a second’s pause, during which the stranger volunteered no further statement, “you speak English like an Englishman.”

“Do I?” the stranger answered.  “Well, I’m glad of that.  It’ll make intercourse with your Englishmen so much more easy.”

By this time Philip’s curiosity was thoroughly whetted.  “But you’re not an Englishman, you say?” he asked, with a little natural hesitation.

“No, not exactly what you call an Englishman,” the stranger replied, as if he didn’t quite care for such clumsy attempts to examine his antecedents.  “As I tell you, I’m an Alien.  But we always spoke English at home,” he added with an afterthought, as if ready to vouchsafe all the other information that lay in his power.

“You can’t be an American, I’m sure,” Philip went on, unabashed, his eagerness to solve the question at issue, once raised, getting the better for the moment of both reserve and politeness.

“No, I’m certainly not an American,” the stranger answered with a gentle courtesy in his tone that made Philip feel ashamed of his rudeness in questioning him.

“Nor a Colonist?” Philip asked once more, unable to take the hint.

“Nor a Colonist either,” the Alien replied curtly.  And then he relapsed into a momentary silence which threw upon Philip the difficult task of continuing the conversation.

The member of Her Britannic Majesty’s Civil Service would have given anything just that minute to say to him frankly, “Well, if you’re not an Englishman, and you’re not an American, and you’re not a Colonist, and you are an Alien, and yet you talk English like a native, and have always talked it, why, what in the name of goodness do you want us to take you for?” But he restrained himself with difficulty.  There was something about the stranger that made him feel by instinct it would be more a breach of etiquette to question him closely than to question any one he had ever met with.