A party of boys disported themselves noisily on the range of stone posts that form a bodyguard round the ancient lamp-surmounted pump, but otherwise the place was wrapped in dignified repose suited to its age and station.

And very pleasant it looked on this summer afternoon, with the sunlight gilding the foliage of its wide-spreading plane trees and lighting up the warm-toned brick of the house-fronts.

We walked slowly down the shady west side, near the middle of which my companion halted.
"This is the house," she said.

"It looks gloomy and forsaken now; but it must have been a delightful house in the days when my ancestors could look out of the windows through the open end of the square across the fields and meadows to the heights of Hampstead and Highgate." She stood at the edge of the pavement looking up with a curious wistfulness at the old house; a very pathetic figure, I thought, with her handsome face and proud carriage, her threadbare dress and shabby gloves, standing at the threshold of the home that had been her family's for generations, that should now have been hers, and that was shortly to pass away into the hands of strangers.
I, too, looked up at it with a strange interest, impressed by something gloomy and forbidding in its aspect.

The windows were shuttered from basement to attic, and no sign of life was visible.