When Bunting went back into the sitting-room Daisy had disappeared. She had gone downstairs with the tray. “Where’s my girl?” he said irritably.
“She’s just taken the tray downstairs.”
He went out to the top of the kitchen stairs, and called out sharply, “Daisy! Daisy, child! Are you down there?”
“Yes, father,” came her eager, happy voice.
“Better come up out of that cold kitchen.”
He turned and came back to his wife. “Ellen, is the lodger in? I haven’t heard him moving about. Now mind what I says, please! I don’t want Daisy to be mixed up with him.”
“Mr. Sleuth don’t seem very well to-day,” answered Mrs. Bunting quietly. “’Tain’t likely I should let Daisy have anything to do with him. Why, she’s never even seen him. ’Tain’t likely I should allow her to begin waiting on him now.”
But though she was surprised and a little irritated by the tone in which Bunting had spoken, no glimmer of the truth illumined her mind. So accustomed had she become to bearing alone the burden of her awful secret, that it would have required far more than a cross word or two, far more than the fact that Bunting looked ill and tired, for her to have come to suspect that her secret was now shared by another, and that other her husband.
Again and again the poor soul had agonised and trembled at the thought of her house being invaded by the police, but that was only because she had always credited the police with supernatural powers of detection. That they should come to know the awful fact she kept hidden in her breast would have seemed to her, on the whole, a natural thing, but that Bunting should even dimly suspect it appeared beyond the range of possibility.
And yet even Daisy noticed a change in her father. He sat cowering over the fire—saying nothing, doing nothing.