"I want a quiet street," said the wily writer, and named the one in
which it stood. "Have you nothing there?"
"I have one," said the agent with reserve, "and it's only seventy."
"The less the better," cried Langholm, light-heartedly. "I should like
to see that one."
The house-agent hesitated, finally looking Langholm in the face.
"You may as well know first as last," said he, "for we have had enough
trouble about that house. It was let last year for ninety; we're asking
seventy because it is the house in which Mr. Minchin was shot dead.
Still want to see it?" inquired the house-agent, with a wry smile.
It was all Langholm could do to conceal his eagerness, but in the end he
escaped with several orders to view, and the keys of the house of houses
in his pocket. No caretaker could be got to live in it; the agent seemed
half-surprised at Langholm's readiness to see over it all alone.
About an hour later the novelist stood at a door whose name and number
were not inscribed upon any of the orders obtained by fraud from the
King's Road agent. It was a door that needed painting, and there was a
conspicuous card in the ground-floor window.
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