“Have you ever noticed them?  They are only studios by name, and are merely a set of rooms in a corner house, with the windows slightly enlarged, and the rents charged accordingly in consideration of that additional five inches of smoky daylight, filtering through dusty windows.  On the ground floor there is the order office of some stained glass works, with a workshop in the rear, and on the first floor landing a small room allotted to the caretaker, with gas, coal, and fifteen shillings a week, for which princely income she is deputed to keep tidy and clean the general aspect of the house.

“Mrs. Owen, who was the caretaker there, was a quiet, respectable woman, who eked out her scanty wages by sundry—­mostly very meagre—­tips doled out to her by impecunious artists in exchange for promiscuous domestic services in and about the respective studios.

“But if Mrs. Owen’s earnings were not large, they were very regular, and she had no fastidious tastes.  She and her cockatoo lived on her wages; and all the tips added up, and never spent, year after year, went to swell a very comfortable little account at interest in the Birkbeck Bank.  This little account had mounted up to a very tidy sum, and the thrifty widow—­or old maid—­no one ever knew which she was—­was generally referred to by the young artists of the Rubens Studios as a ‘lady of means.’  But this is a digression.

“No one slept on the premises except Mrs. Owen and her cockatoo.  The rule was that one by one as the tenants left their rooms in the evening they took their respective keys to the caretaker’s room.  She would then, in the early morning, tidy and dust the studios and the office downstairs, lay the fire and carry up coals.

“The foreman of the glass works was the first to arrive in the morning.  He had a latch-key, and let himself in, after which it was the custom of the house that he should leave the street door open for the benefit of the other tenants and their visitors.

“Usually, when he came at about nine o’clock, he found Mrs. Owen busy about the house doing her work, and he had often a brief chat with her about the weather, but on this particular morning of February 2nd he neither saw nor heard her.  However, as the shop had been tidied and the fire laid, he surmised that Mrs. Owen had finished her work earlier than usual, and thought no more about it.  One by one the tenants of the studios turned up, and the day sped on without any one’s attention being drawn noticeably to the fact that the caretaker had not appeared upon the scene.

“It had been a bitterly cold night, and the day was even worse; a cutting north-easterly gale was blowing, there had been a great deal of snow during the night which lay quite thick on the ground, and at five o’clock in the afternoon, when the last glimmer of the pale winter daylight had disappeared, the confraternity of the brush put palette and easel aside and prepared to go home.  The first to leave was Mr. Charles Pitt; he locked up his studio and, as usual, took his key into the caretaker’s room.