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 mistaken an undesirable suburb for
a desirable one, a very easy mistake for a foreigner to make; and he was
delighted at the cheapness of the house, the greenness of the old lawn,
the height of the grimy trees within the red brick wall.

He lived there all one summer, and the cement smoke got into his throat
in the autumn and gave him asthma, for which complaint he had obviously
been designed by Providence, for he had no neck. He used the Signal
House occasionally from Saturday till Monday. Then he gave it up
altogether, and tried to sell it. It stood empty for some years, while
the Russian banker extended his business and lived virtuously elsewhere.
Then he suddenly began using the house again as a house of recreation,
and brought his foreign servants, and his foreign friends and their
foreign servants, to stay from Saturday till Monday.

And all these persons behaved in an odd, Continental way, and played
bowls on the lawn at the back of the house on Sundays. The neighbors
could hear them but could see nothing, owing to the thickness of the
grimy trees and the height of the old brick wall. But no one worried
much about the Signal House; for they were a busy people who lived all
around, and had to earn their living, in addition to the steady and
persistent assuagement of a thirst begotten of cement dust and the
pungent smell of bone manure. One or two local amateurs had made sure
of the fact that there was nothing in the house that would repay a
burglarious investigation, which, added to the fact that the police
station is only a few doors off, tended to allay a natural curiosity as
to the foreign gentleman's possessions.