"Oh, dear, no, nothing of the kind, not a hint of such a thing. Fact is--well, it sounds ridiculous to say with reference to a popular block of flats in the middle of London, but two foolish women--an excitable actress and her servant, your predecessors in the flat--have spread reports as to queer noises. Well, you know, don't you? the sort of nonsense women will talk." "In plain English, they say the place is haunted." "Ha, ha! Something in that nature. You have hit it! Something in that nature. Absurd thing!" "Who knows?" David had a cold disbelief in spooks, but it amused him to see the agent squirm; and he sat tight. Those eyelids fluttered again, and Mr. Dibbin banged a ledger with wrathful fist. "Look here, Mr. Harcourt," cried he finally. "This is a five-guineas-a-week flat. I'll make you a fair offer; take it for six months and I give it you at half price." "I laying the ghost at two and a half guineas weekly?" "Put it any way you like. If a man of sound common-sense like you lives there for a considerable period, the wretched affair will be forgotten; so it is worth the loss to me, and it is a first-class bargain for you." "Done!" said David. The agent was so pleased that his annoyance vanished; he promised to secure a woman whom he knew to look after the new tenant's housekeeping. She had probably never heard of the Eddystone Mansions tragedy. He would have her in the flat within four days. Meanwhile a charwoman might attend to things generally. The references having proved satisfactory, David was now passing his first evening in his new abode. He had purchased some books and stationery; his charwoman had left him; and, when the door had closed behind her, he turned from the head of the dead girl in chalks over the mantelpiece to gaze out of the dining-room window, and back again to the sweet face in chalks, to return presently to the window. It was a Thursday evening in the last week of January. The housekeeper was to arrive on Saturday. David fixed Monday as a good day to start work. In the interim he meant to loaf, dine at noteworthy restaurants, read, and go to theaters. A man accustomed to guide his movements by the position of mountain-ranges or the stars, and count distances by his days on horseback, is likely to find himself all unhinged within a four-mile radius. David was in the novice stage of acquaintanceship with the magnetic life of the world's capital. Not yet did the roar of London sing in familiar harmonies; the crunch of the omnibuses, the jingle of the hansoms, made no music in his ears. There was something uncanny in the silence of the millions eddying through the streets. Where all else was clamor, mankind was dumb, save for the shouts of the newsboys, the jabber of bus-conductors, the cries of itinerant venders.