It had taken years for the Old Housekeeper to mature, and I knew that in the best sense of the word she could never be replaced. But the knowledge did not prepare me for the New Housekeeper. Mrs. Haines was a younger and apparently stronger woman, but she was so casual in her dress, and so eager to emulate the lilies of the field, as to convince me that it was not in her, under any conditions, to mature into a housekeeper at all. It expressed much, I thought, that while the Old Housekeeper had always been "the Housekeeper," we never knew Mrs. Haines by any name but her own. The fact that she had a husband was her recommendation to the landlord, who had been alarmed by the fire and the hysterics into which it threw the Old Housekeeper, and now insisted upon a man in the family as an indispensable qualification for the post. The advantage might have been more obvious had Mr. Haines not spent most of his time in dodging the tenants and helping them to forget his presence in the house. He was not an ill-looking nor ill-mannered man, and shyness was the only explanation that occurred to me for his perseverance in avoiding us. Work could not force him from his retirement. Mrs. Haines said that he was a carpenter by trade, but the only ability I ever knew him to display was in evading whatever job I was hopeful enough to offer him. Besides, though it might be hard to say what I think a carpenter ought to look like, I was certain he did not look like one, and others shared my doubts. The rumour spread through our street--where everybody rejoices in the knowledge of everything about everybody else who lives in it--that he had once been in the Civil Service, but had married beneath him and come down in the world. How the rumour originated I never asked, or never was told if I did ask; but it was so evident that he shrank from the practice of the carpenter's trade that once we sent him with a letter to the Publisher--who shares our love of the neighbourhood to the point, not only of publishing from it, but of living in it--asking if some sort of place could not be found for him in the office. It was found, I am afraid to his disappointment, for he never made any effort to fill it, and was more diligent than ever in keeping out of our way. If he saw us coming, on the rare occasions when he stood at the front door, or the rarer when he cleaned the gas-bracket above it, he would run if there was time, or, if there was not, turn his head and stare fixedly in the other direction that he might escape speaking to us. As the months went on, he was never caught cleaning anything or doing anything in the shape of work, except sometimes, furtively, as if afraid of being detected in the act, shutting the front door when the clocks of the neighbourhood struck eleven. He was far less of a safeguard to us than I often fancied he thought we were to him.