It is an ordinary villa residence. There are flowers in the windows, and all the signs of well-to-do occupation. But in this ordinary-looking villa there is a room at the back in which the light of day never penetrates. The shutters are always closed, the door is always kept locked. Only one person has that key, the lady to whom the house belongs. She lives there with a brother and a sister, who came to make their home with her in her hour of distress, and who do their best to brighten a life that has known a great sorrow. The lady came to the house a young married woman. It was the house that she and her fiancé selected and furnished to be their home when they returned from their honeymoon. The young couple knew in it one happy month. Then the young husband went out one day and never returned. From that hour no inkling of his fate ever reached the unhappy bride, whose reason almost gave way under the strain and stress of the long agony of suspense. On the day that he went out from the home to which he was never to return, the young husband was expected back at six o'clock in the evening. It was his birthday, and a little birthday dinner had been arranged, to which a few intimate friends had been invited. It was the young wife's first dinner-party, and she took great pride in the arrangement of the room and the floral decorations of the table. The table as it was laid out for that little dinner-party remains to-day. The flowers are dead and withered, the table-linen is yellow with age, the furniture is faded and decayed, and desolation has settled on the scene. But the wife so suddenly and mysteriously widowed refused from the first to allow a thing in the room to be touched. The birthday-table is still laid for the husband, who will never come home again. Here in the south-west of London is a little old-fashioned shop in which second-hand furniture and curios are sold. There is nothing out of the common in the shop, yet it has its strange romance. If you look over the doorway you will see a Chinese name. If you enter the shop the young lady who comes forward, though she has Oriental features, addresses you in ordinary English, with perhaps a slightly Cockney twang. The shop was founded by her father, a young Chinaman who suddenly appeared in London. No one knew where he came from. He wore Chinese dress and a pigtail, and started in business with a hired barrow, with which he went round to houses in the neighbourhood, buying the odds and ends that people wanted to get rid of. Gradually he became less Chinese in appearance. The pigtail went, and he took to European clothes. He seemed to have prospered, for he took a little shop, and later on married an Englishwoman. It was quite a humble little shop at first, but there passed in and out of it occasionally Chinamen who were evidently grandees. They came in elegant carriages, and, according to report, they were mandarins.