* * * * *

It seems to have been about this point that he first perceived it clearly—­distinguished it, that is to say, from the whole atmosphere of startling and suggesting mystery that surrounded him.

He looked at Frank in silence a moment or two....

There Guiseley sat—­leaning back in the red leather chair, his cocoa still untouched.  He was in a villainous suit that once, probably, had been dark blue.  The jacket was buttoned up to his chin, and a grimy muffler surrounded his neck.  His trousers were a great deal too short, and disclosed above a yellow sock, on the leg nearest to him, about four inches of dark-looking skin.  His boots were heavy, patched, and entirely uncleaned, and the upper toe-cap of one of them gaped from the leather over the instep.  His hands were deep in his pockets, as if even in this warm room, he felt the cold.

There was nothing remarkable there.  It was the kind of figure presented by unsatisfactory candidates for the men’s club.  And yet there was about him this air, arresting and rather disconcerting....

It was a sort of electric serenity, if I understand Mr. Parham-Carter aright—­a zone of perfectly still energy, like warmth or biting cold, as of a charged force:  it was like a real person standing motionless in the middle of a picture. (Mr. Parham-Carter did not, of course, use such beautiful similes as these; he employed the kind of language customary to men who have received a public school and university education, half slang and half childishness; but he waved his hands at me and distorted his features, and conveyed, on the whole, the kind of impression I have just attempted to set down.)

Frank, then, seemed as much out of place in this perfectly correct and suitable little room as an Indian prince in Buckingham Palace; or, if you prefer it, an English nobleman (with spats) in Delhi.  He was just entirely different from it all; he had nothing whatever to do with it; he was wholly out of place, not exactly as regarded his manner (for he was quite at his ease), but with regard to his significance.  He was as a foreign symbol in a familiar language.

Its effect upon Mr. Parham-Carter was quite clear and strong.  He instanced to me the fact that he said nothing to Frank about his soul:  he honestly confessed that he scarcely even wished to press him to come to Evensong on Sunday.  Of course, he did not like Frank’s being a Roman Catholic; and his whole intellectual being informed him that it was because Frank had never really known the Church of England that he had left it. (Mr. Parham-Carter had himself learned the real nature of the Church of England at the Pusey House at Oxford.) But there are certain atmospheres in which the intellectual convictions are not very important, and this was one of them.  So here the two young men sat and stared at one another, or, rather, Mr. Parham-Carter stared at Frank, and Frank looked at nothing in particular.