“That’s all right,” he said.  “All before my time, I expect.  They might come in, you know.”

“Oh, no!” said the clergyman.  “I told them not, and—­”

“Well, let’s come to business,” said Frank.  “It’s about a girl.  You saw that man to-day?  You saw his sort, did you?  Well, he’s a bad hat.  And he’s got a girl going about with him who isn’t his wife.  I want to get her home again to her people.”

“Yes?”

“Can you do anything? (Don’t say you can if you can’t, please....) She comes from Chiswick.  I’ll give you her address before I go.  But I don’t want it muddled, you know.”

The clergyman swallowed in his throat.  He had only been ordained eighteen months, and the extreme abruptness and reality of the situation took him a little aback.

“I can try,” he said.  “And I can put the ladies on to her.  But, of course, I can’t undertake—­”

“Of course.  But do you think there’s a reasonable chance?  If not, I’d better have another try myself.”

“Have you tried, then?”

“Oh, yes, half a dozen times.  A fortnight ago was the last, and I really thought—­”

“But I don’t understand.  Are these people your friends, or what?”

“I’ve been traveling with them off and on since June.  They belong to you, so far as they belong to anyone.  I’m a Catholic, you know—­”

“Really?  But—­”

“Convert.  Last June.  Don’t let’s argue, my dear chap.  There isn’t time.”

Mr. Parham-Carter drew a breath.

There is no other phrase so adequate for describing his condition of mind as the old one concerning head and heels.  There had rushed on him, not out of the blue, but, what was even more surprising, out of the very dingy sky of Hackney Wick (and Turner Road, at that!), this astonishing young man, keen-eyed, brown-faced, muscular, who had turned out to be a school-fellow of his own, and a school-fellow whose reputation, during the three hours since they had parted, he had swiftly remembered point by point—­Guiseley of Drew’s—­the boy who had thrown off his coat in early school and displayed himself shirtless; who had stolen four out of the six birches on a certain winter morning, and had conversed affably with the Head in school yard with the ends of the birches sticking out below the skirts of his overcoat; who had been discovered on the fourth of June, with an air of reverential innocence, dressing the bronze statue of King Henry VI. in a surplice in honor of the day.  And now here he was, and from his dress and the situation of his lodging-house to be reckoned among the worst of the loafing class, and yet talking, with an air of complete confidence and equality of a disreputable young woman—­his companion—­who was to be rescued from a yet more disreputable companion and restored to her parents in Chiswick.

And this was not all—­for, as Mr. Parham-Carter informed me himself—­there was being impressed upon him during this interview a very curious sensation, which he was hardly able, even after consideration, to put into words—­a sensation concerning the personality and presence of this young man which he could only describe as making him feel “beastly queer.”