mber looked out over a rear
wall separating the vegetable garden of Rosemary Villa from the
shrub-adorned confines of a place which fronted on the next street.

The visitor decided on the former chamber; he carefully closed the
blinds and drew across the window the dark, heavy curtains. This would
answer very well; excellent accommodations for a man whose own chambers
in the city were now in the hands of renovators--the painters, the
paper-hangers, the plumbers. And the back room? He paused, as if
considering the servant's assumption of his purpose in coming hither. He
might as well let the fellow think--

Yes, he would venture to make use of that for his work; could thus take
advantage of the force of circumstances that had arisen to alienate him
from prosaic citations, writs or arraignments. But he must, with
strained lightness, emphasize one point; for a brief spell he did not
wish to be disturbed. People might call; people probably would, anxious
clients, almost impossible to get rid of, unless--

No one must know where he was, under any circumstances; his voice
sounded almost jocular, at singular variance with the heaviness, the
weariness of his face. He, the old servant, had been a soldier; knew how
to fulfil, then, a request or an order. Something crinkled in the
speaker's hand, passed to the other who was now busying himself with the
bath; the man's moist fingers did not hesitate to close on the note. He
had been a hardened campaigner and incidentally a good forager; he
remarked at once he would carry out to the letter all his master's
visitor asked.

Half an hour later, John Steele, clad in his dressing-gown, sat alone
near the fire in his room; every sound had ceased save at intervals a
low creaking of old timber. Now it came from overhead, then from the
hall or near the window, as if spirit feet or fingers were busy in that
venerable, quaint domicile. But these faint noises, inseparable from
houses with a history, John Steele did not hear; the food and the bath
had awakened in him a momentary alertness; he seemed waiting--for what?
Something that did not happen; heaviness, depression again weighed on
him; to keep awake he stirred himself and again glanced about. Here were
evidences of odd taste on the part of the tenant in the matter of
household decoration; a chain and ball that had once been worn by a
certain famous convict reposed on an _etagere_, instead of the customary
vase or jug of pottery; other