When he gained his room, the rear apartment that overlooked the side yard, his first action was to go to the window and survey the prospect. He found it disappointing. The roses were there, to be sure, and the hammock; but roses and hammocks do not always in themselves satisfy. He lighted a pipe and wondered a trifle impatiently why the denizens of the house beyond the box-hedged garden kept indoors when there was a cool and shady porch and a comfortable hammock awaiting them. He felt somewhat aggrieved over it. When Bob--the general factotum of the establishment--brought up his supper and set the frayed white cloth over the table Burton contemplated making inquiries as to the occupants of the house at whose blank windows he had been gazing for the better part of an hour. But on second thought he refrained; there was something alluring in the thought of nursing his ignorance; he could give his fancy full swing and make of the rose-filled space beyond the iron fence an Enchanted Garden and of the girl in white an imprisoned Princess. The idea appealed to him, and he recalled with satisfaction that the voice he had heard calling from the house--that is to say, Castle--had sounded Blue Beardish to a degree. So he merely sent Bob for a fresh syphon of soda and uncorked the bottle of Scotch whiskey with a thrill of something approaching excitement. [Illustration] [Illustration] Burton frequently wondered, when he gazed about his apartments, why he had thought it necessary to rent two rooms from Mrs. Phillips. So far as space went one would have been quite enough. The front room overlooked King’s Street, or would have done so had the trees which grew close to the windows allowed, and was broad and long and high, with white walls and ceiling against which three old yellow-stained steel engravings looked lamentably inadequate. Even the big four-poster bed seemed lost in the immensity of the apartment. The rear room was more cheerful. It was no smaller and there were the same glaringly white walls, but the furnishings were more numerous and the adornments more ambitious. Here he was the proud possessor of six pictures, a framed sampler, three advertising calendars, and two lithographed mottoes. He never tired of studying the sampler; its artistic effects fascinated him even though the information conveyed was but slight: [Illustration] A b c d e f g H i j k l m n O p q r s t u V w x y z & ELIZABETH R. WARREN HER WORK 1827 1838