I go, whatever changes may happen to this
beloved house, nothing can ever prevent me
from looking on it as my home. I came
here, sir, with Mr. Badgery after our honeymoon.
All the brief happiness of my life
was once contained within these four walls.
Every dear remembrance that I fondly
cherish is shut up in these sacred rooms."

Again the voice ceased, and again the soft
groans echoed round my empty walls, and
oozed out past me down my uncarpeted
staircase.

I reflected. Mrs. Badgery's brief happiness
and dear remembrances were not
included in the list of fixtures. Why could
she not take them away with her? Why
should she leave them littered about in the
way of my furniture? I was just thinking
how I could put this view of the case strongly
to Mrs. Badgery, when she suddenly left off
groaning, and addressed me once more.

"While this house has been empty," she
said, "I have been in the habit of looking in
from time to time, and renewing my tender
associations with the place. I have lived, as
it were, in the sacred memories of Mr.
Badgery and of the past, which these dear, these
priceless rooms call up, dismantled and dusty
as they are at the present moment. It has
been my practice to give a remuneration to
the attendant for any slight trouble that I
might occasion——"

"Only sixpence, sir," whispered the old
woman, close at my ear.

"And to ask nothing in return," continued
Mrs. Badgery, "but the permission to bring
my camp-stool with me, and to meditate on
Mr. Badgery in the empty rooms, with every
one of which some happy thought, or eloquent
word, or tender action of his, is so sweetly
associated. I came here on my usual errand
to-day. I am discovered, I presume, by the
new proprietor of the house—discovered, I
am quite ready to admit, as an intruder. I
am willing to go, if you wish it after hearing
my explanation. My heart is full, sir; I am
quite incapable of contending with you. You
would hardly think it, but I am sitting on
the spot once occupied by our ottoman. I
am looking towards the window in which my
flower-stand once stood. In this very place,
Mr. Badgery first sat down and clasped me
to his heart, when we came back from our
honey-moon trip. 'Matilda,' he said, 'your
drawing-room has been expensively papered,
carpeted, and furnished for a month; but it
has only been adorned, love, since you entered
it.' If you have no sympathy, sir, for such
remembrances as these; if you see nothing
pitiable in my position, taken in connection
with my presence here; if you cannot enter
into my feelings, and thoroughly understand
that this is not a house, but a Shrine—you
have only to say so, and I am quite willing
to go."

She spoke with the air of a martyr—a
martyr to my insensibility. If she had been
the proprietor and I had been the intruder,
she could not have been more mournfully
magnanimous. All this time, too, she never
raised her veil—she has never raised it, in my
presence, from that time to this.  I have no
idea whether she is young or old, dark or fair,
handsome or ugly: my impression is, that
she is in every respect a finished and perfect
Gorgon, but I have no basis of fact on which
I can support that dismal idea.  A moving
mass of crape, and a muffled voice—that, if
you drive me to it, is all I know, in a
personal point of view, Mrs. Badgery.

"Ever since my irreparable loss, this has
been the shrine of my pilgrimage, and the
altar of my worship," proceeded the voice.
"One man may call himself a landlord, and say
that he will let it; another man may call
himself a tenant, and say that he will take it.  I
don't blame either of those two men; I don't
wish to intrude on either of those two men;
I only tell them that this is my home; that
my heart is still in possession, and that no
mortal laws, landlords, or tenants can ever
turn it out.  If you don't understand this,
sir; if the holiest feelings that do honour to
our common nature have no particular
sanctity in your estimation, pray do not scruple
to say so; pray tell me to go."

"I don't wish to do anything uncivil,
ma'am," said I.  "But I am a single man,
and I am not sentimental." (Mrs. Badgery
groaned.)  "Nobody told me I was coming
into a Shrine when I took this house;
nobody warned me, when I first went over it,
that there was a Heart in possession.  I regret
to have disturbed your meditations, and
I am sorry to hear that Mr. Badgery is dead.
That is all I have to say about it; and, now,
with your kind permission, I will do myself
the honour of wishing you good morning,
and will go up-stairs to look after the fixtures
on the second floor."

Could I have given a gentler hint than
this?  Could I have spoken more
compassionately to a woman whom I sincerely
believe to be old and ugly?  Where is the
man to be found who can lay his hand on his
heart, and honestly say that he ever really
pitied the sorrows of a Gorgon?  Search
through the whole surface of the globe; and
you will discover human phenomena of all
sorts, but you will not find that man.

To resume. I made her a bow, and left
her on the camp-stool, in the middle of the
drawing-room floor, exactly as I had found
her. I ascended to the second floor, walked
into the back room first, and inspected the
grate. It appeared to be a little out of
repair, so I stooped down to look at it closer.
While I was kneeling over the bars, I was
violently startled by the fall of one large
drop of warm water, from a great height,
exactly in the middle of a bald place, which
has been widening a great deal of late years
on the top of my head. I turned on my
knees, and looked round. Heaven and earth!