In this pretty thoroughfare with its £100 p.a. houses (detached), its tiny carriage drives, its white muslin curtains hanging stiffly from glittering brass bands, its window boxes of clustering geraniums and its neat lawns, it was a tradition that no one house knew anything about its next-door neighbour—_or wanted to know_. You might imagine, did you find yourself deficient in charity, that such a praiseworthy attitude was in the nature of a polite fiction, but you may judge for yourself. The news that No. 64, for so long standing empty, and bearing on its blank windows the legend "To Let—apply caretaker," had at length found a tenant was general property on September 6. The information that the new people would move in on the 17th was not so widespread until two days before that date. Master Willie Outram (of 65, "Fairlawn ") announced his intention of "seeing what they’d got," and was very promptly and properly reproved by his mother. "You will be good enough to remember that only rude people stare at other people’s furniture when it is being carried into the house," she admonished icily; "be good enough to keep away, and if I see you near 64 when the van comes I shall be very cross." Which gives the lie to the detractors of Kymott Crescent. Her next words were not so happily chosen. "You might tell me what She’s like," she added thoughtfully. To the disgust of Willie, the van did not arrive at 64 until dusk. He had kept the vigil the whole day to no purpose. It was a small van, damnably small, and I do not use the adverb as an expletive, but to indicate how this little pantechnicon, might easily have ineffaceably stamped the penury of the new tenants. And there was no She. Two men came after the van had arrived. They were both tall, both dressed in grey, but one was older than the other. The younger man was clean-shaven, with a keen brown face and steady grey eyes that had a trick of laughing of themselves. The other might have been ten years older. He too was clean-shaven, and his skin was the hue of mahogany. A close observer would not have failed to notice, that the hands of both were big, as the hands of men used to manual labour. They stood on either side of the tiled path that led through the strip of front garden to the door, and watched in silence, the rapid unloading of their modest property. Willie Outram, frankly a reporter, mentally noted the absence of piano, whatnot, mirror and all the paraphernalia peculiar to the Kymott Crescent drawing-room. He saw bundles of skins, bundles of spears, tomahawks (imagine his ecstasy!) war drums, guns, shields and trophies of the chase. Bedroom furniture that would disgrace a servant’s attic, camp bedsteads, big lounge chairs and divans. Most notable absentee from the furnishings was She—a fact which might have served as food for discussion for weeks, but for the more important discovery he made later.