MY wound, though at first of little apparent importance, proved troublesome, in consequence, perhaps, of the irritable and feverish condition of my feelings when I received it; and, even after it was healed up, the deep disgust I had conceived for St Stephen's Chapel, or (which was the same thing) my own unfortunate exhibition there, left me little disposition to go abroad. My wife, too, who had, I need scarcely say, been terribly shocked with what had happened, was now in a very feeble state both of mind and body, and demanded all my attention. In a word, I became a recluse in the midst of the great city; and, of course, nobody took the trouble to notice it. I seldom quitted my house at all until dusk, and then used to walk up and down the streets with as perfect a feeling of solitude, as if the crowds of people, passing and repassing me, had been the trees of some central forest, or waves roaring below me upon some untrodden beach.

During my recovery, Joanne used often to entertain me with the curiosity which some servants’ stories had excited in her provincial mind in regard to the house next to ours, and the strange behaviour of its unknown inhabitants. The windows in front of this house, she said, had never once been opened since we came to reside there, nor, so far as she could hear, for some time before. To the street it had all the appearance of total desertion. No person ever knocked at the door,—no carriage ever stopped there; the window-shutters were always barred, and the glasses as dim and dusty as if the air had not reached them for years and years. Yet the house was inhabited. A little dog had been heard barking through the partition-wall: this was the first hint of their being anybody within. But, afterwards, a young woman-servant had been seen in the little garden behind, apparently returning to the house in that way from the Mews-lane. More lately, a beautiful child, evidently a gentleman's child, had been seen playing once or twice in the same little garden—but quite alone. Still the same desolation reigned all over the external appearance of the house.