“Rather livelier than usual to-night?” he observed and received an affirmative answer.  Some evenings now you’d hardly ever hear anything passing from sunset to sunrise and find it as quiet as the tomb.

Who lived on the right, on the left?  The visitor asked several questions casually; the house to the right, the man thought, might be vacant; no one appeared to live in it very long.  At least the moving van seemed to have acquired a habit of stopping there; the one on the left had a more stable tenant; a lady who appeared in the pantomime, or the opera, he wasn’t sure which,—­only, foreign people sometimes went in and out.

John Steele rose with an effort; no, there was nothing more he required, except rest!  Which room would he prefer, he was asked when he found himself on the upper landing; the man had put his things in a front chamber; but the back one was larger.  John Steele forced himself to consider; he even inspected both of the rooms; that on the front floor had one window facing the Row; the second chamber looked out over a rear wall separating the vegetable garden of Rosemary Villa from the shrub-adorned confines of a place which fronted on the next street.

The visitor decided on the former chamber; he carefully closed the blinds and drew across the window the dark, heavy curtains.  This would answer very well; excellent accommodations for a man whose own chambers in the city were now in the hands of renovators—­the painters, the paper-hangers, the plumbers.  And the back room?  He paused, as if considering the servant’s assumption of his purpose in coming hither.  He might as well let the fellow think—­

Yes, he would venture to make use of that for his work; could thus take advantage of the force of circumstances that had arisen to alienate him from prosaic citations, writs or arraignments.  But he must, with strained lightness, emphasize one point; for a brief spell he did not wish to be disturbed.  People might call; people probably would, anxious clients, almost impossible to get rid of, unless—­

No one must know where he was, under any circumstances; his voice sounded almost jocular, at singular variance with the heaviness, the weariness of his face.  He, the old servant, had been a soldier; knew how to fulfil, then, a request or an order.  Something crinkled in the speaker’s hand, passed to the other who was now busying himself with the bath; the man’s moist fingers did not hesitate to close on the note.  He had been a hardened campaigner and incidentally a good forager; he remarked at once he would carry out to the letter all his master’s visitor asked.