CHAPTER V
THE HOUSE "OVER THE WATER"
THE Mediterranean Squadron, that magnificent display of naval force that is the guarantee of peace in Europe, after a week of gay festivities in Leghorn, had sailed for Gaeta, while I, glad to escape from the glaring heat, found myself back once more in dear old London.
One passes one's time in the South well enough in winter, but after a year even the most ardent lover of Italy longs to return to his own people, be it for ever so brief a space. Exile for a whole year in any Continental town is exile indeed; therefore although I lived in Italy for choice, I, like so many other Englishmen, always managed to spend a month or two in summer in our temperate if much-maligned climate.
London, the same dear dusty old London, only perhaps more dear and more dusty than ever, was my native city; hence I always spent a few weeks in it, oven though all the world might be absent in the country, or at the seaside.
I had idled away a pleasant month up in Buxton, and from there had gone north to the Lakes, and it was one hot evening in mid-August that I found
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