himself
into the arm-chair before the fire to think. It was a room without
beauty, merely walls, repapered once every twenty years, and furniture of
the mid-Victorian era. The mantelshelf in the bedroom still bore stains
from the medicine bottles which consoled the final hours of the last
tenant, a man about whom a curious story was told.

It seems that he found a West End anchorage there, not when he had
retired, but when he was in the very prime of life. He never told anyone
that he was single; at the same time he never told anyone he was married.
He just came and rented those three rooms, and there his man brought him
his tea at ten o'clock every morning for thirty years. Then he dressed
himself and went round to the Devonshire, in St. James's Street, and
there remained till closing time, at two o'clock, every morning for
thirty years. When his club closed in the dog-days for repairs he went to
the club which received him. He never went out of town. He never slept a
night away. He never had a visitor. He never received a letter, and, so
far as his man was aware, never wrote one.

One morning he did not go through his usual programme. The doctor was
called, but during the next fortnight he died.

Within twelve hours, however, his widow and a family of grown-up children
arrived, pleasant, cheerful, inquisitive people, who took away with them
everything portable, greatly to the chagrin of the devoted old manservant
who had been the tenant's single home-tie for thirty years.

It was these selfsame, dull, monotonous chambers which Walter occupied.
The old manservant was the selfsame man who had so devotedly served the
previous tenant. They suited Walter's purpose, for he was seldom in
London, so old Hayden had the place to himself for many months every
year. Of all the inhabitants of London chambers those are the most lonely
who never wander away from London. But Walter was ever wandering,
therefore he never noticed the shabbiness of the carpet, the dinginess of
the furniture, or the dispiriting gloom of everything.

Like the previous tenant, Walter had no visitors and was mostly out all
day. At evening he would write at the dusty old bureau in which the late
tenant had kept locked his family treasures, or sit in the deep, old
horsehair-covered chair with his feet upon the fender, as he did that
night after returning from Hill Street.

The only innovation in those grimy rooms was a good-sized fireproof safe
which st