Holdsworth dared scarcely glance at it. When his eye encountered the name he turned cold, and felt the damp perspiration suffusing his forehead.
He came back hurriedly, with the bare impression on his mind of a small house with the upper blinds drawn, and with an untended garden in the front.
He returned to the main entrance of the road, stopped, looked back, and then slowly retraced his steps.
There was a house of an older fashion than any of the others on the right-hand side, about midway; one that had evidently taken root there many years before the little villas had gathered themselves together to intercept its view and violate its pastoral solitude. Its doorway was sheltered by a roomy porch, with creepers clambering up its trellised supporters; its darkling windows had the burnished glitter upon them that is peculiar to old glass; its eaves were capacious enough to accommodate a whole colony of swallows, and it had a fair piece of ground stretching away at its back. The bright brass knocker on the green door, the white doorsteps, the purity of the window glass, and the spotlessness of the window drapery, afforded an excellent guarantee of the housewifely qualities of the inmates. In one of the windows hung a card. Holdsworth opened the gate and knocked.
“I should like to see your apartments,” he said to the cheerful-faced, middle-aged woman who had promptly replied to his summons.
“Certainly, sir; please to walk in.”
She threw open the door of a long sitting-room, smelling of lavender and mignonette, and furnished with worked chairs, old china, a tall wooden clock with a febrile tick, a hearth-rug decorated with blue and yellow roses in wool, and a sour squeezed-looking bookcase which seemed to hold sundry folios under protest, and to threaten the instant ejection of a number of small books on the top shelves, which leaned one against another, some of them gaping apparently in the last extremity of terror.
“For yourself, sir? Or might there be children?”
“For myself.”
“Why, then, sir,” exclaimed the woman, with great alacrity, “I think I can accommodate you. You can have this room, and a bed-room just over it, and the use of the pianner in the next room when you see company, for fourteen shillings a week.”