Theodore made a tour of the little garden in the summer sundown. It was very small, but its age gave it a superiority over most suburban gardens. There were trees, and hardy perennials that had been growing year after year, blooming and fading, with very little care on the part of successive tenants. The chief charm of the garden to some people might have been its seclusion. There was no possibility of being “overlooked” in this narrow pleasaunce, and overlooking is the curse of the average garden attached to the average villa. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, taking their ease, or working in their garden in the cool of the evening, are uncomfortably conscious of Mr. and Mrs. Smith eyeing them from the drawing-room windows of next door. Here the high wall on one side, and the tall horse-chestnuts on the other, made a perfect solitude; but seclusion on a very small scale is apt to merge into dulness, and it must be owned that the garden of Myrtle Cottage at sundown was about as melancholy a place as the mind of man could imagine. Theodore, contemplating it from the standpoint of Mrs. Danvers’ history, her friendlessness, her sense of degradation, wondered that she could have endured that dismal atmosphere for a single summer. And she had lived there for many years; lived there till weariness must have become loathing. “God help her, poor soul!” he said to himself. “How she must have abhorred that weeping ash! How it must have tortured her to see the leaves go and come again year after year, and to know that neither spring nor autumn would better her fate!” He took down the address of the agent who had the letting of the house, and left with the intention of seeing him that evening if possible. The landlord was a personage resembling the Mikado, or the Grand Llama, and was not supposed to be accessible to the human vision, certainly not in relation to his house property. The policeman’s wife averred that “him and the De Crespignys owned half Camberwell.” The agent was represented to live over his office, which was in no less famous a locality than Camberwell Grove, and was likely, therefore, to oblige Mr. Dalbrook by seeing him upon a business matter after business hours. It was not much past seven when Theodore entered the office, where he found the agent extending his business hours so far as to be still seated at his desk, deep in the revision of a catalogue. He was a very genial agent, and he put aside the catalogue immediately, asked Theodore to be seated, and wheeled round his office chair to talk to him. “Myrtle Cottage. Yes, a charming little box, convenient and compact, a bijou residence for a bachelor with a small establishment. Such a nice garden, too, retired and rustic. If you were thinking of taking the property on a repairing lease, the rent would be very moderate, really a wonderfully advantageous occasion for any one wanting a pretty secluded place.”