Walters gave me the address of the agents; and, after submitting to an examination that could not have been more severe if I had asked for the hand of the senior partner’s daughter, they let me come here to live. The garden was mine! And the captain? Three days after I arrived I heard above me, for the first time, the tread of his military boots. Now again my courage began to fail. I should have preferred to leave Archie’s letter lying in my desk and know my neighbor only by his tread above me. I felt that perhaps I had been presumptuous in coming to live in the same house with him. But I had represented myself to Walters as an acquaintance of the captain’s and the caretaker had lost no time in telling me that “my friend” was safely home. So one night, a week ago, I got up my nerve and went to the captain’s rooms. I knocked. He called to me to enter and I stood in his study, facing him. He was a tall handsome man, fair-haired, mustached--the very figure that you, my lady, in your boarding-school days, would have wished him to be. His manner, I am bound to admit, was not cordial. “Captain,” I began, “I am very sorry to intrude--” It wasn’t the thing to say, of course, but I was fussed. “However, I happen to be a neighbor of yours, and I have here a letter of introduction from your cousin, Archibald Enwright. I met him in Interlaken and we became very good friends.” “Indeed!” said the captain. He held out his hand for the letter, as though it were evidence at a court-martial. I passed it over, wishing I hadn’t come. He read it through. It was a long letter, considering its nature. While I waited, standing by his desk--he hadn’t asked me to sit down--I looked about the room. It was much like my own study, only I think a little dustier. Being on the third floor it was farther from the garden, consequently Walters reached there seldom. The captain turned back and began to read the letter again. This was decidedly embarrassing. Glancing down, I happened to see on his desk an odd knife, which I fancy he had brought from India. The blade was of steel, dangerously sharp, the hilt of gold, carved to represent some heathen figure. Then the captain looked up from Archie’s letter and his cold gaze fell full upon me. “My dear fellow,” he said, “to the best of my knowledge, I have no cousin named Archibald Enwright.” A pleasant situation, you must admit! It’s bad enough when you come to them with a letter from their mother, but here was I in this Englishman’s rooms, boldly flaunting in his face a warm note of commendation from a cousin who did not exist! “I owe you an apology,” I said. I tried to be as haughty as he, and fell short by about two miles. “I brought the letter in good faith.” “No doubt of that,” he answered. “Evidently it was given me by some adventurer for purposes of his own,” I went on; “though I am at a loss to guess what they could have been.”