It is within sound of the bells that jingle dismally on the heads of the tram-car horses, plying their trade on the high-road, and yet it is haunted.  Its two great iron gates stand on the very pavement, and they are never opened.  Indeed, a generation or two of painters have painted them shut, and grime and dirt have laid their seals upon the hinges.  A side gate gives entrance to such as come on foot.  A door in the wall, up an alley, is labelled “Tradesman’s Entrance,” but the tradesmen never linger there.  No merry milkman leaves the latest gossip with his thin, blue milk on that threshold.  The butcher’s chariot wheels never tarry at the corner of that alley.  Indeed, the local butcher has no chariot.  His clients mostly come in a shawl, and take their purchases away with them wrapped in a doubtful newspaper beneath its folds.  The better-class buyers wear a cloth cricketing cap, coquettishly attached to a knob of hair by a hat-pin.

The milkman, moreover, is not a merry man, hurrying on his rounds.  He goes slowly and pessimistically, and likes to see the halfpenny before he tips his measure.

This, in a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it—­a noble wreck on a barren, social shore.  For the Signal House was once a family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as a quaint and interesting demesne.  Finally its price fell with a crash, and an elderly lady of weak intellect was sent by her relations to live in it, with two servants, who were frequently to be met in Gravesend in the evening hours, at which time, it is to be presumed, the elderly lady of weak intellect was locked in the Signal House alone.  But the house never had a ghost.  Haunted houses very seldom have.  The ghost was the mere invention of some kitchen-maid.

Haunted or not, the house stood empty for years, until suddenly a foreigner took it—­a Russian banker, it was understood.  A very nice, pleasant-spoken little gentleman this foreigner, who liked quiet and the river view.  He was quite as broad as he was long, though he was not preposterously stout.  There was nothing mysterious about him.  He was well known in the City.  He had merely mistaken an undesirable suburb for a desirable one, a very easy mistake for a foreigner to make; and he was delighted at the cheapness of the house, the greenness of the old lawn, the height of the grimy trees within the red brick wall.

He lived there all one summer, and the cement smoke got into his throat in the autumn and gave him asthma, for which complaint he had obviously been designed by Providence, for he had no neck.  He used the Signal House occasionally from Saturday till Monday.  Then he gave it up altogether, and tried to sell it.  It stood empty for some years, while the Russian banker extended his business and lived virtuously elsewhere.  Then he suddenly began using the house again as a house of recreation, and brought his foreign servants, and his foreign friends and their foreign servants, to stay from Saturday till Monday.