He spent more than a week in visiting the numerous agencies which are employed by the great governess-class, and the result of that painstaking exploration was not altogether barren. He succeeded in finding an elderly personage at the head of an old-established Agency, who kept her book with praiseworthy regularity, and who remembered Sarah Newton. She had had no less than four Miss Newtons on her register at different times, but there was only one Sarah Newton among them, and for this lady she had obtained a situation in the Lake Country so lately as July 20, 1873—that is to say, about eleven years before the period of Theodore’s investigation. On that date Miss Newton had entered the family of a Mr. Craven—the vicar of a small parish between Ambleside and Bowness. She was living in that family four years afterwards, when Miss Palmer, the Principal in the Agency, last heard of her. “And in all probability she is living there still,” said Miss Palmer. “At her time of life people are not fond of change. I remember her when she was a young woman, full of energy, and very impatient of control. I used to see her much oftener then. She seldom kept a situation over a twelvemonth.” “Except at Cheriton Chase. She was more than a year in that situation, I think.” “Cheriton Chase! I don’t remember the name. Some one else may have got her the situation. How long ago was she there, do you suppose?” asked Miss Palmer, turning over one of her neat basil-bound registers. “It was in the year ’47 she left Cheriton.” “Ah, then, it was not we who got her the situation. My first entry about her is on the 11th December, ’48. She paid her entrance fee of one guinea on that date. It is higher than that of inferior agencies; but we take real trouble for our clients, and we make it our business to be safe upon the point of CHARACTER. We are as careful about the families into which we send governesses as about the governesses we introduce into families.” * * * * * The next day was Sunday, and Theodore employed that day of rest in travelling by a very slow train to Bowness; where he arrived at five o’clock in the evening, to find mountain and lake hidden in densest grey, and an innkeeper who seemed neither to desire nor deserve visitors. Happily the traveller was of the age at which dinner is not a vital question, and he was hardly aware of the toughness of the steak, or the inferior quality of the codfish set before him in the desolate coffee-room. He had a diamond Virgil in his pocket, and he sat by the fire reading the sixth book by the paraffin lamp till ten o’clock, and then went contentedly to a bedroom which suggested ghosts, or at least nightmare.