re was a house to let in the
Precincts.

"I'll take it," said Rosamund at once. "Esme Darlington has found me a
tenant for No. 5, an old friend of his, or rather two old friends, Sir
John and Lady Tenby. Where is it?"

He took her to see it.

The house in question had been occupied by the widow of a Dean, who had
recently been driven by her health to "relapse upon Bournemouth." It was
a small old house with two very large rooms--one was the drawing-room,
the other a bed-room.

The house stood at right angles to the east end of the Cathedral, from
which it was only divided by a strip of turf broken up by fragments
of old gray ruins, and edged by an iron railing, and by a paved
passage-way, which led through the Dark Entry from the "Green Court,"
where the Deanery and Minor Canons' houses were situated, to the
pleasaunce immediately around the Cathedral. To the green lawns of this
wide pleasaunce the houses of the residentiary Canons gave access. One
projecting latticed window of the drawing-room of Mrs. Browning's house,
another of the big bedroom above it, and the windows of the kitchen and
the servants' quarters looked on to the passage-way and the Cathedral;
all the other windows looked into an old garden surrounded by a very
high brick wall, a garden of green turf like moss, of elm trees, and, in
summer, of gay herbaceous borders, a garden to which the voices of the
chimes dropped down, and to which the Cathedral organ sent its message,
as if to a place that knew how to keep safely all things that were
precious. Even the pure and chill voices of the boy choristers found
a way to this hidden garden, in which there were straight and narrow
paths, where nuns might have loved to walk unseen of the eyes of men.

The Dean's widow had left behind all her furniture, and was now adorning
a Bournemouth hotel, in which her sprightly invalidism and close
knowledge of the investments of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and of
the habits and customs of the lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated.
Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There
were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional
tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean's widow
as meretricious. But these could easily be "managed." Rosamund was
enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton
radiantly curious, and almost as excited as a joyous schoolgirl.

"I must poke my nose in