“There was a cottage near by--my father had it. I jest call to mind _his_ father plantin’ the orchard--a very old man as couldn’t expect to see the fruit. A fine orchard it wur--Blenum orringe trees and Tom Spuds and all sorts. Dickson’s tannery stands there now. If you went on, through the fields and across the road, you come to Hillyar’s farm--that’s Stern & Carson’s brewery. Hillyar’s pears was wonderful for keepin’. I mind Loo Hillyar--sich arms;” he leered at Minnie, whose face was chalky under her black bonnet. “You don’t see young women like that these times. Sich a hand at butter-making. It must be fifty--forty year ago or more since me an’ her drove geese over the common. It couldn’t ha’ been so fur from where we stands, neither. Here, as you may say, or thereabouts--but the face of the earth do change so.” He spat on his hands and bent his back to the weary task of tidying the melancholy mound of clinkers and starved ferns. I gave him sixpence and I gave Minnie my arm. She clutched it wildly. There was a shadow on her pretty, common face--the shadow of the unexplainable. What did it mean? I don’t pretend to say. Odd, wasn’t it? But then the world is odd. We just skim it and fancy we have proved all. Minnie? She went back to a City office as typist, and she married the principal in less than a year. She was always the sort of girl to do well for herself--her marriage with Chaytor was an aberration. She lives in a very swagger house at East Croydon, wears rather loud dresses, and talks persistently of “my cook.” THE SET AT SEVEN. SHALL I tell you about the set at 7? It is quite a proper story. You might call it dramatic. If poor Nat Chaytor were alive he would turn it into one of his thrilling tales for the penny papers--and get it rejected because it wasn’t probable. In popular tales you must be probable, and you must be proper. You may cut as many throats and embezzle as much money as you please--always remembering to do it in a thoroughly respectable manner. Orchard lived at 7--the left-hand set on the third floor. His was the most extraordinary affair. Poor Jimmy died there. Orion had the set--has it still, so they say. He comes back. We have a real, if rather foolish, ghost in the Inn. The man who took that set after the Great Ormond Street murder--his name slips me, but he went down in the _Drummond Castle_--had never seen Orion. I forget his name, but we’ll call him Drummond. Pearson went to see him one night. He happened to be just going out; he said he wouldn’t be more than half an hour, and he made Pearson comfortable with some whisky and the current _Fortnightly._ When he came back Pearson said, with annoyance, looking a little disgusted and jerking his head toward the bedroom door: “Didn’t know you were so intimate with Orion.” “Orion! Never heard the name. Yet--let me see. He had these rooms. I took them over with the furniture.”