Page:Malvina of Brittany - Jerome (1916).djvu/129

 the house to him, and he crossed over and looked at the number.

"Quite right," he said, on returning. "I made inquiries this morning. She was released six weeks ago on ticket-of-leave."

He took my arm.

"Not much use hanging about," he said. "The blind won't go up to-night. Rather a clever idea, selecting a house just opposite a lamp-post."

He had an engagement that evening; but later on he told me the story—that is, so far as he then knew it.

It was in the early days of the garden suburb movement. One of the first sites chosen was off the Finchley Road. The place was in the building, and one of the streets —Laleham Gardens—had only some half a dozen houses in it, all unoccupied save one. It was a lonely, loose end of the suburb, terminating suddenly in open fields. From the unfinished end of the road the ground sloped down somewhat steeply to a pond, and beyond that began a small wood. The one house occupied had been bought by a young married couple named Hepworth.