ouse was of distinctly composite structure. Tradition said that it had
been a royal hunting lodge in the days when Barnes and Putney and
Wimbledon were tiny hamlets and the Thames flowed silver-clear through a
vast, wild region of forest and gorse and heather, and the ancestors of
the deer in Richmond Park browsed in the shade of ancient oaks and elms
and beeches, and antler-crowned monarchs sent their hoarse challenges
bellowing across the open spaces which separated their jealously guarded
domains.

Generation by generation it had grown with the wealth and importance of
its owners, as befits a house that is really a home and not merely a
place to live in, until it had become a quaint medley of various styles
of architecture from the Elizabethan to the later Georgian. Thus it had
come to possess a charm that was all its own, a charm that can never
belong to a house that has only been built, and has not grown. Its
interior was an embodiment in stone and oak and plaster of cosy comfort
and dignified repose, and, though it contained every "modern
improvement," all was in such perfect taste and harmony that even the
electric light might have been installed in the days of the first James.

The Professor inhabited the northern wing, reputed to have been the
original lodge in which kings and queens and great soldiers and
statesmen had held revel after the chase, and tradition had endowed it
with a quite authentic ghost: which was that of a fair maiden who had
been decoyed thither to become the victim of royal passion, and who,
strangely enough, poisoned herself in her despair, instead of getting
herself made a duchess and founding the honours of a noble family on her
own dishonour.

Although, as I have said, quite authentic, for the Professor had seen
her so often that he had come to regard her with respectful friendship,
the Lady Alicia was not quite an orthodox ghost. She did not come at
midnight and wail in distressing fashion over the scene of her sad and
shameful death. She seemed to come when and where she listed, whether in
the glimpses of the moon or the full sunlight of mid-day. She never
passed beyond the limits of the old lodge, and never broke the silence
of her coming and goings. None of the present inhabitants of "The
Wilderness" had seen her save the Professor, but Nitocris had often
shivered with a sudden chill when she chanced to be in her invisible
presence, and at such times she would often say to her fat