entiment with regard to that
house. Our people have lived in it ever since it was built, when the
square was first laid out in the reign of Queen Anne, after whom it was
named. It is a dear old house. Would you like to see it? We 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 widespreading 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 of 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.

I, too, looked up at it with a strange interest, impressed by something
gloomy and forbidding in its aspect. The windows were shuttered from
basement to attic, and no sign of life was visible. Silent, neglected,
desolate, it breathed an air of tragedy. It seemed to mourn in
sackcloth and ashes for its lost master. The massive door within the
splendid carven portico was crusted with grime, and seemed to have
passed out of use as completely as the ancient lamp-irons or the rusted
extinguishers wherein the footmen were wont to quench their torches
when some Bellingham