Since she was apparently between seventy and eighty—­and looked every year of her apparent age—­I deemed that possible.  Miss Coleman was evidently a character.  If one was desirous of getting information out of her it would be necessary to allow her to impart it in her own manner,—­to endeavour to induce her to impart it in anybody else’s would be time clean wasted.  We had Sydney’s fate before our eyes.

She started with a sort of roundabout preamble.

’This property is mine; it was left me by my uncle, the late George Henry Jobson,—­he’s buried in Hammersmith Cemetery just over the way,—­he left me the whole of it.  It’s one of the finest building sites near London, and it increases in value every year, and I’m not going to let it for another twenty, by which time the value will have more than trebled,—­so if that is what you’ve come about, as heaps of people do, you might have saved yourselves the trouble.  I keep the boards standing, just to let people know that the ground is to let,—­though, as I say, it won’t be for another twenty years, when it’ll be for the erection of high-class mansions only, same as there is in Grosvenor Square,—­no shops or public houses, and none of your shanties.  I live in this place just to keep an eye upon the property,—­and as for the house over the way, I’ve never tried to let it, and it never has been let, not until a month ago, when, one morning, I had this letter.  You can see it if you like.’

She handed me a greasy envelope which she ferreted out of a capacious pocket which was suspended from her waist, and which she had to lift up her skirt to reach.  The envelope was addressed, in unformed characters, ’Miss Louisa Coleman, The Rhododendrons, Convolvulus Avenue, High Oaks Park, West Kensington.’—­I felt, if the writer had not been of a humorous turn of mind, and drawn on his imagination, and this really was the lady’s correct address, then there must be something in a name.

The letter within was written in the same straggling, characterless caligraphy,—­I should have said, had I been asked offhand, that the whole thing was the composition of a servant girl.  The composition was about on a par with the writing.

’The undersigned would be oblidged if Miss Coleman would let her emptey house.  I do not know the rent but send fifty pounds.  If more will send.  Please address, Mohamed el Kheir, Post Office, Sligo Street, London.’

It struck me as being as singular an application for a tenancy as I remembered to have encountered.  When I passed it on to Lessingham, he seemed to think so too.

‘This is a curious letter, Miss Coleman.’

’So I thought,—­and still more so when I found the fifty pounds inside.  There were five ten-pound notes, all loose, and the letter not even registered.  If I had been asked what was the rent of the house, I should have said, at the most, not more than twenty pounds,—­because, between you and me, it wants a good bit of doing up, and is hardly fit to live in as it stands.’