We went up. He opened the door with his key. Minnie was cooking the dinner, her bit of beefsteak fizzled and sputtered savagely in the pan. Her pretty little pinched face was like a thundercloud. “Never mind the dinner,” Chaytor said, going up to the fire and kissing her effusively. “My darling! I’ve had such a find. We might go and live there; rent would be next to nothing. My articles would keep the pot boiling. I should insist on your selling your typewriter--no cursed machinery there! I should have to be careful going in and out of the gray gate--that is all. If anyone else spotted it we should be ruined.” He sat down in the first chair, panting a little. Minnie said impatiently: “What on earth does he mean?” She dished up her steak and pressed me none too graciously to have some with them. So we three sat round the little table, and Chaytor told us all he had seen. He told it so vividly--I have repeated it to you almost word for word--that he really flung a glamour over this mean little London room. He sat just there, with his back to the cupboard where they kept their bundles of wood--where I still keep mine. Poor Chaytor! The smell of the country seemed to blow over us all. Even Minnie grew faintly excited. “But it is impossible,” she said. “Why, I know Stamford Hill; an aunt of mine lived there once. She had a house standing in its own grounds.” She glanced at me to see if this fact impressed me. “But there is no country there. I’m certain of it. I used to spend my Sundays with Aunt Jane. The last old house was pulled down years ago. Six streets of villas stand on the site. I’ve seen them.” But Chaytor babbled on of his lilac woman. “It’s all nonsense,” Minnie said more clinchingly. “You dreamt it--I believe you’re asleep more than half your time. And even if you weren’t asleep, everyone knows that consumptives have queer fancies. It’s no good wriggling on your chair like that when you know very well that the doctor told you ever so long ago that you had only one lung.” “It was real,” he insisted, flinching a little at her candor. “So real that I seemed to have been there before.” “I know,” I said soothingly. “We all have that feeling sometimes. Bloater paste serves me like that; makes me think of a red-haired fellow in a punt. These things are odd. Murphy used to feel the same over ripe plums--only _his_ was an empty barn and a thunderstorm.” I’ve always tried hard to be practical, you know. I’m convinced that money is the secret of all happiness--though I’ve never had the peculiar quality that makes it. For once I thought that I’d be business-like. “If you should be right,” I said to Chaytor, “there is a fortune in it. I think I know a man who would finance us. By what you say the land is ripe for development; we could cut it up into estates--plant shrubs and rows of horse chestnuts--you know the sort of thing. We’d call it the Marlowe estate, after the Inn.” Chaytor flinched; then he said with a droll smile: