The girl left, and went to the agency to explain matters, and to ask them to get her another situation. The manageress of the agency listened to her story and said nothing. But she remembered that two years previously a servant on their books had left through seeing something of the same sort. On that occasion the girl had described it as a ghost. The truth of the matter was this. The apparition was that of a mad woman--the daughter of the house, a woman of five-and-thirty. Her father and mother had engaged a female keeper, and kept the poor demented creature at home. Ordinarily she was quiet enough. But at times she became cunning or violent, and, escaping from the apartment at the top of the house in which she was kept, made her way into a room occupied by others. The family entertained and had frequent visitors, but only the most intimate of their relatives knew that in the upper part of the house there was a mad woman under restraint. There is a fine house standing in its own grounds in the northern part of London. It is occupied by a wealthy family, and none of the large staff of servants are presumably aware of the secret that the family jealously guard. All they know is that the upper part of one wing of the house, which they never enter, is occupied by their mistress's father, an old gentleman, who is bedridden, and is rather eccentric and dislikes strange faces. For this reason he has his own valet and an aged man-servant to attend to him, and these are the only people, with the exception of the master and mistress, who ever go into that part of the house. But the mistress's bedridden father is a fiction. The rooms in reality are occupied by the son of the house--a son whom, owing to his terrible disfigurement, it would have been more merciful to have strangled at his birth, but who has been loved and reared and tended to live apart from his fellow-men. The unhappy young man's sisters have never seen him. It would not be right that they should be allowed to look upon a terrible affliction which, in common parlance, is called "a freak of nature." Only the father and mother, the two attendants, and the family doctor know how terrible the affliction is, or how shocking is the tragedy the unhappy parents are guarding in the "secret chambers" of their home. All the "freaks," all the strange deformities, are not the offspring of poor parents, who permit them to be seen or exhibited. The joined twins, the side-show phenomena of nature, are born in all ranks of society. Only now and again does the world know of the tragedy--for tragedy it is--in the family circle of the well-to-do. The "misfortune" is concealed. Every precaution is taken against publicity. Sometimes the "afflicted" member of the family is sent away to be guarded and cared for in a medically-superintended home specially arranged for the reception of such "patients."