'It is cold,' he said, with a distinctly foreign accent. 'You are the lucky one, Mr Toomey, with your warm fire.'
Alice glanced furtively at the stranger. He was tall, and was not dressed as she would have expected Mr Toomey's friends to be. He wore a grey military cloak with a high collar, and a large soft felt hat. The brim was turned up in a rather unusual way in front, and leaving exposed as it did a broad, well-shaped forehead and piercing grey eyes, gave to the whole face a bold and daring look. He did not seem to look at Alice at all, and yet he had hardly been seated a minute before he turned to her and said,—
'Forgive me, but I feel as if you were a sort of acquaintance already. I sat just behind you at a lecture in Soho last night. I am not mistaken—you were there, weren't you?'
The introduction of a third person to the enjoyment of the fire and shelter had brought back to Alice the full consciousness of her position, but the new-comer spoke to her so deferentially, and treated her so exactly as if they had met in quite an ordinary way, and there were nothing unusual in the situation, that she felt herself grow a little more at ease again as she answered, 'Yes; I was there.'
'Why, I'm blest if I wasn't there, too,' broke in Toomey, 'and a rare good 'un he was as spoke. Countryman o' yours too, eh, Mr Peter Hitch? By the way,' he added, as the other nodded assent, 'I was wanting to have a word or two with you, if miss here will excuse us. It's on the subject as you knows on,' he explained, seeing the other's look of surprise, and embellishing his speech by sundry winks, to which his visual peculiarities imparted an unusually enigmatical character.
The two men stepped a few paces away, and then Toomey said,—
'I say, mister, I'm in rather a tight place, and perhaps you can tell me a way out of it. That there young woman' (here he lowered his voice) 'would have been down somewhere off Greenwich by this time if it hadn't been for me—the tide was just on the turn. I stopped her going over, and now I feel responsible, like. I did think of taking her home to the missus, but my Mary Jane, though she have the kindest heart, has a sharp tongue, and I don't know quite how she might take it, nor what she might say in the first surprise, like, before she could be got to listen to reason, and that pore young thing's in trouble enough, I know, without being jawed at, and I can't abide jaw myself neither. And yet I don't like to lose sight of her just yet, and what am I to do?'
'I will charge myself with her,' said the other, without the slightest hesitation. 'You can trust her to me, friend Toomey, can you not?'
'I'd trust you with anything, sir,' said Toomey.
The other went straight back to the fire where Alice sat, already deep again in her own bitter thoughts.