At about eleven o'clock—that is to say, about ten minutes before Mr. Carmel's visit to us—the stranger had been lying on a sofa in his quarters, with two ancient and battered novels from Austin's Library in Cardyllion, when the door opened unceremoniously, and Mr. Carmel, in travelling costume, stepped into the room. The hall-door was standing open, and Mr. Carmel, on alighting from his conveyance, had walked straight in without encountering any one in the hall. On seeing an intruder in possession he stopped short; the gentleman on the sofa, interrupted, turned towards the door. Thus confronted, each stared at the other.
"Ha! Marston," exclaimed the ecclesiastic, with a startled frown, and an almost incredulous stare.
"Edwyn! by Jove!" responded the stranger, with a rather anxious smile, which faded, however, in a moment.
"What on earth brings you here?" said Mr. Carmel, sternly, after a silence of some seconds.
"What the devil brings you here?" inquired the stranger, almost at the same moment. "Who sent you? What is the meaning of it?"
Mr. Carmel did not approach him. He stood where he had first seen him, and his looks darkened.
"You are the last man living I should have looked for here," said he.
"I suppose we shall find out what we mean by-and-by," said Marston, cynically; "at present I can only tell you that when I saw you I honestly thought a certain old gentleman, I don't mean the devil, had sent you in search of me."
Carmel looked hard at him. "I've grown a very dull man since I last saw you, and I don't understand a joke as well as I once did," said he; "but if you are serious you cannot have learnt that this house has been lent to me by Mr. Ware, its owner, for some months at least; and these, I suppose, are your things? There is not room to put you up here."
"I didn't want to come. I am the famous man you may have read of in the papers—quite unique—the man who escaped alive from the Conway Castle. No Christian refuses shelter to the shipwrecked; and you are a Christian, though an odd one."