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Of all houses in London this, I thought, was the least suitable to me.

Looking down the table I told myself that it must be the very home of
idle gossip and the hot-bed of tittle-tattle.

I was wrong. Hardly had I been in the house a day when I realised that
my fellow-guests were the most reserved and self-centred of all possible
people.

One old gentleman who wore a heavy moustache, and had been a colonel in
the Indian army, was understood to be a student of Biblical prophecy,
having collected some thousands of texts which established the identity
of the British nation with the lost tribes of Israel.

Another old gentleman, who wore a patriarchal beard and had taken orders
without securing a living, was believed to be writing a history of the
world and (after forty years of continuous labour) to have reached the
century before Christ.

An elderly lady with a benign expression was said to be a tragic actress
who was studying in secret for a season at the National Theatre.

Such, and of such kind, were my house-mates; and I have since been told
that every great city has many such groups of people, the great
prophets, the great historians, the great authors, the great actors whom
the world does not know--the odds and ends of humanity, thrown aside by
the rushing river of life into the gulley-ways that line its banks, the
odd brothers, the odd sisters, the odd uncles, the odd aunts, for whom
there is no place in the family, in society, or in the business of the
world.

It was all very curious and pathetic, yet I think I should have been
safe, for a time at all events, in this little corner of London into
which chance had so strangely thrown me, but for one unfortunate
happening.

That was the arrival of the daily newspaper.

There was never more than a single copy. It came at eight in the morning
and was laid on the dining-room mantelpiece, from which (by an unwritten
law of the house) it was the duty as well as the honour of the person
who had first finished breakfast to take it up and read the most
startling part of the news to the rest of the company.

Thus it occurred that on the third morning after my arrival I was
startled by the voice of the old colonel, who, standing back to the
fire, with the newspaper in his hand, cried:

"Mysterious Disappearance of a Peeress."

"Read it," said the old clergyman.

The tea-cup which I was raising to my mouth trembled in my hand, and
when I set it down it r