are quite near it now."

I assented eagerly. If it had been a coal-shed or a fried-fish shop I
would still have visited it with pleasure, for the sake of prolonging
our walk; but I was also really interested in this old house as a part
of the background of the mystery of the vanished John Bellingham.

We crossed into Cosmo Place, with its quaint row of the, now rare,
cannon-shaped iron posts, and passing through stood for a few moments
looking into the peaceful, stately old square. A party of boys disported
themselves noisily on the range of stone posts that form a bodyguard
round the ancient lamp-surmounted pump, but otherwise the place was
wrapped in dignified repose suited to its age and station. And very
pleasant it looked on this summer afternoon, with the sunlight gilding
the foliage of its wide-spreading plane trees and lighting up the
warm-toned brick of the house-fronts. We walked slowly down the shady
west side, near the middle of which my companion halted.

"This is the house," she said. "It looks gloomy and forsaken now; but it
must have been a delightful house in the days when my ancestors could
look out of the windows through the open end of the square across the
fields and meadows to the heights of Hampstead and Highgate."

She stood at the edge of the pavement looking up with a curious
wistfulness at the old house; a very pathetic figure, I thought, with
her handsome face and proud carriage, her threadbare dress and shabby
gloves, standing at the threshold of the home that had been her family's
for generations, that should now have been hers, and that was shortly to
pass away into the hands of strangers.