esumably a square
house of the Jacobean period--presumably because it is so hidden by
trees, so wrapped in grimy ivy, so dust-laden and so impossible to get
at, that its outward form is no longer to be perceived.

It is within sound of the bells that jingle dismally on the heads of
the tram-car horses, plying their trade on the high-road, and yet it is
haunted. Its two great iron gates stand on the very pavement, and they
are never opened. Indeed, a generation or two of painters have painted
them shut, and grime and dirt have laid their seals upon the hinges. A
side gate gives entrance to such as come on foot. A door in the wall,
up an alley, is labelled "Tradesman's Entrance," but the tradesmen never
linger there. No merry milkman leaves the latest gossip with his thin,
blue milk on that threshold. The butcher's chariot wheels never tarry at
the corner of that alley. Indeed, the local butcher has no chariot. His
clients mostly come in a shawl, and take their purchases away with them
wrapped in a doubtful newspaper beneath its folds. The better-class
buyers wear a cloth cricketing cap, coquettishly attached to a knob of
hair by a hat-pin.

The milkman, moreover, is not a merry man, hurrying on his rounds. He
goes slowly and pessimistically, and likes to see the halfpenny before
he tips his measure.

This, in a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could
live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it--a
noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a
family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as
a quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash,
and an elderly lady of weak intellect was sent by her relations to live
in it, with two servants, who were frequently to be met in Gravesend in
the evening hours, at which time, it is to be presumed, the elderly lady
of weak intellect was locked in the Signal House alone. But the house
never had a ghost. Haunted houses very seldom have. The ghost was the
mere invention of some kitchen-maid.

Haunted or not, the house stood empty for years, until suddenly a
foreigner took it--a Russian banker, it was understood. A very nice,
pleasant-spoken little gentleman this foreigner, who liked quiet and
the river view. He was quite as broad as he was long, though he was not
preposterously stout. There was nothing mysterious about him. He was
well known in the City. He had merely mis