THE stranger, thus hailed, turned as the doctor’s voice rang down the road, and acknowledging the somewhat rough summons with a bow of mock affability, stepped obligingly up the hill. The neighbors who had flocked into the street to watch the meeting, saw the doctor’s lip curl as the wretched figure advanced. This man, Ephraim Earle? Why had he called these credulous creatures fools? They were simply madmen. But in another moment his countenance changed. The miserable fellow had paused and was standing a few feet off with what could not be called other than a look of old comradeship. He spoke first also and with quite a hearty ring to his naturally strident voice.

“Well, Oswald, old boy, this is a pleasure! Now don’t say you don’t remember me—” for the doctor had started back with an irrepressible gesture of disgust that to some eyes was not without its element of confusion, “I know I am changed, but no more so than you are, if you have led a more respectable life than I.”

“Scoundrel!” leaped from Dr. Izard’s white lips. “How dare you address me as if we were, or ever had been, friends! You are a brazen adventurer, and I—”

“And you are the perfectly irreproachable physician with a well-earned fame, and a past as free from shadow as—well, as your face is free from surprise at this unexpected return of one you probably thought dead.”

Confounded by this audacity and moved by many inner and conflicting emotions, Dr. Izard first flushed, then stood very still, surveying the man with a silent passion which many there thought to be too emphatic a return for what sounded to them like nothing more than an ill-judged pleasantry. Then he spoke, quietly, but with a sort of gasp, odd to hear in his usually even and melodious voice.

“I do not know you. Whatever you may call yourself, you are a stranger to me, and no stranger has a right to address me with impertinence. What do you call yourself?” he suddenly demanded, advancing a step and darting his gaze into the other’s eyes with a determination that would have abashed most men whether they were all they proclaimed themselves to be or not.

A playful sneer, a look in which good-natured forbearance still struggled uppermost, were all that he got from this man.

“So you are determined not to recognize Ephraim Earle,” cried the stranger. “You must have good reasons for it, Oswald Izard; reasons which it would not be wise perhaps for one to inquire into too curiously.”

It was an attack for which the doctor was not fully prepared. He faltered for an instant and his cheek grew livid, but he almost immediately recovered himself, and with even more than his former dignity, answered shortly:

“Now you are more than impertinent, you are insolent. I do not need to have secret reasons for repudiating any claims you may make to being Polly Earle’s father. Your face denies the identity you usurp. You have not a trait of the man you call yourself. Your eyes——”

“Oh, do not malign my eyes,” laughed the stranger. “They are faded I know and one lid has got a way of drooping of late years, which has greatly altered my expression. But they are the same eyes, doctor, that watched with you beside the bed of Huldah Earle and if they fail to meet you with just the same mixture of trembling hope and fear as they did then it is because youthful passions die out with the years and I no longer greatly care for any verdict you may have to give.”

A frown hard to fathom corrugated the doctor’s forehead and he continued to survey in silence the bold face that declined to blench before him.

“So you persist—” he remarked at length. “Then you are a villain as well as an impostor.”

“Villain or impostor, I am at least Ephraim Earle,” asserted the other; adding as he noted the doctor’s fingers tighten on the slight stick he carried, “Oh, you need not show your hatred quite so plainly, Dr. Izard. I do not hate you, whatever cause I may have to do so. Have I not said that my old passions are dried up, and even signified that my coming back was but a whim? Curraghven-hoodah, Oswald, you weary me with your egotism. Let us shake hands and be comrades once more.”

The audacity, the superiority even, with which these words were said, together with the cabalistic phrase he used—a phrase which Dr. Izard was ready to swear even at that moment of shock and confusion, was one known only to himself and Polly’s father,—had such an effect upon him that he reeled and surveyed the speaker with something of superstitious fear and horror. But at the malicious gleam which this momentary weakness called up in the eye of his antagonist, he again regained his self-command, and stepping firmly up to him, he vociferated with stern emphasis:

“I repeat that you are an impostor. I do not know you, nor do I know your name. You say you are Ephraim Earle, but that is a lie. I knew that man too well to be deceived by you. You have neither his eyes, his mouth, nor his voice, I will say nothing of his manners.”

“Oh,” spoke up a voice from behind, “he looks like Ephraim Earle. You cannot say he does not look like Ephraim Earle.”

The doctor turned sharply, but his antagonist, who neither seemed to ask nor need the support of any one or anything but his own audacity, responded with a mocking leer:

“No matter what I look like. He says he cannot be deceived by my eyes, my mouth, or my voice. That is good. That sounds like a man who is sure of himself. But friends—” Here his voice rose and the menace which he had hitherto held in abeyance became visible in his sharpened glance—“he can be deceived by his own prejudices. Dr. Izard does not want to know me because he was Huldah Earle’s attending physician, and her death, as you all know, was very sudden and very peculiar.”

Venomous as the insinuation was, it was a master-stroke and won for its audacious author the cause for which he had been battling. The doctor, who had worked himself up into a white heat, flushed as if a blood-vessel was about to burst in his brain, and drawing back, stepped slowly from before the other’s steady and openly triumphant gaze. Not till he reached the outskirts of the crowd, did he recover himself, and then he halted only long enough to cry to the jostling and confused crowd he had just left:

“He looks like a tramp and he talks like a villain. Be careful what credit you give him, and above all, look after Polly Earle.”