He walked to Camberwell on the following afternoon, surprised at the strange world through which he passed on his way there, the teeming, busy, noisy world—the world which makes such a hard fight for life. The Grove itself, after that bustling, seething road, seemed a place in which nightingales might have warbled, and laughing girls hidden from their lovers in the summer dusk. The very atmosphere of decay from a better state was soothing. There were trees still, and gardens, and here and there pretty, old-fashioned houses; and in a long narrow garden between two larger houses he found Myrtle Cottage. There was a board up, and the neglected garden indicated that the cottage had been a long time without a tenant. There was a policeman’s wife living in it, with a colony of small children, in the cotton-pinafore stage of existence, and with noses dependent upon maternal supervision, so much so that scarcely had the matron attended to one small snub than her attention was called off to another, which gave a distracted air to all her conversation. She took Mr. Dalbrook over the house, and expatiated upon the damp walls, and the utter incompetence of the cistern and pipes to meet the exigencies of a family, which was the more to be regretted on the ground that the landlord declined to do anything in the way of repairs, as he intended to pull the house down in a few years with a view to making better use of the ground. “And indeed that’s about all it’s fit for,” said the policeman’s wife. “It ain’t fit for anybody to _live_ in.” The rooms had even a more desolate look than rooms in empty houses usually have, in consequence of this long neglect. The cottage had been empty for two years and a half, long enough for the damp to make hideous blotches upon all the walls, and trace discoloured maps of imaginary continents upon all the ceilings; long enough for the spiders to weave their webs in all the corners, for rust to eat deep into the iron grates, and for dust and dirt to obscure every window. Theodore stood in the room which had once been a drawing-room, and which boasted of a wide French window looking out upon a lawn, with a large weeping-ash directly in front of the window, and much too near for airiness or health, a melancholy-looking tree in which Theodore thought Mrs. Danvers might have found a symbol of her own life, as she stood at the window and looked at those dull drooping branches against a background of ivy-covered wall. CHAPTER XXII. “And if we do but watch the hour, There never yet was human power Which could evade, if unforgiven, The patient search and vigil long Of him who treasures up a wrong.”