s 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.

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 dame was borne up the steps in her gilded chair, in the days
of good Queen Anne.

It was in a somewhat sobered frame of mind that we presently turned away
and started homeward by way of Great Ormond Street. My companion was
deeply thoughtful, relapsing for a while into that sombreness of manner
that had so impressed me when I first met her. Nor was I without a
certain sympathetic pensiveness; as if, from the great, silent house,
the spirit of the