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