Mr. Sheldon's study at Bayswater did not offer much more to the eye of the investigator than Mr. Sheldon's office in the City. There were the handsomely bound books behind the inviolable plate-glass doors, and there was the neat writing-table with the machine for weighing letters, and the large business-like looking blotting-pad, and the ponderous brass-rimmed inkstand, with no nonsense about it; and yonder, on a clumsy little oak table with thick legs, appeared the copying machine, with a big black iron lever, and a massive screw with which to screw all the spontaneous feeling out of every letter that came beneath its crushing influence. Up and down this joyless den Valentine Hawkehurst paced, with the demon of impatience raging in his breast. The July sunshine blazed hot upon the window, and the voices of croquet-players in adjacent gardens rose shrill upon the summer air. And there were girls playing croquet while she, his "rose of the garden, garden of girls," lay sick unto death! O, why could he not offer a hecatomb of these common creatures as a substitute for that one fair spirit? He looked into the garden--the prim modern garden, but a few years reclaimed from that abomination of desolation, the "eligible lot of building land." Across the well-kept lawn there brooded no shadow of Old-World cedar; no century-old espaliers divided flower and kitchen ground; no box-edging of the early Hanoverian era bordered the beds of roses and mignonette. From one boundary-wall to the other there was not a bush old enough to hang an association upon. The stereotyped bed of flaming yellow calceolaria balanced the conventional bed of flaming crimson verbena; the lavender heliotrope faced the scarlet geranium, like the four corners in a quadrille. The garden was the modern nurserymen's ideal of suburban horticulture, and no more. But to Valentine this half-acre of smooth lawn and Wimbledon gravel pathway had seemed fair as those pleasure gardens of Semiramis, at the foot of the Bagistanos mountain, the fame whereof tempted Alexander to turn aside from the direct road, during his march from Chelone to the Nysaic horse pastures. To-day the contemplation of that commonplace garden gave him direful pain. Should he ever walk there again with his dear love, or in any other garden upon earth? And then he thought of fairer gardens, in supernal regions whither his soul was slow to travel. "Not easy is the journey from earth to the stars," says the sage; and from this young wanderer the stain of earthly travel had yet to be washed away.