THE strange, the weird, the romantic, may be found at every turn of the great maze of mystery which is called London.
The homes of mystery and romance lie often at our very doors, unknown and unexpected. We pass a scene that the novelist or the dramatist could turn to thrilling account, and to us it suggests not even a passing thought of wonder.
Here is a house in a fashionable road in that part of the north-west which borders on Hampstead.
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.