After she had laid the lodger’s breakfast on the table she prepared to leave the room. “I suppose I’m not to do your room till you goes out, sir?”
And Mr. Sleuth looked up sharply. “No, no!” he said. “I never want my room done when I am engaged in studying the Scriptures, Mrs. Bunting. But I am not going out to-day. I shall be carrying out a somewhat elaborate experiment—upstairs. If I go out at all” he waited a moment, and again he looked at her fixedly “—I shall wait till night-time to do so.” And then, coming back to the matter in hand, he added hastily, “Perhaps you could do my room when I go upstairs, about five o’clock—if that time is convenient to you, that is?”
“Oh, yes, sir! That’ll do nicely!”
Mrs. Bunting went downstairs, and as she did so she took herself wordlessly, ruthlessly to task, but she did not face—even in her inmost heart—the strange tenors and tremors which had so shaken her. She only repeated to herself again and again, “I’ve got upset—that’s what I’ve done,” and then she spoke aloud, “I must get myself a dose at the chemist’s next time I’m out. That’s what I must do.”
And just as she murmured the word “do,” there came a loud double knock on the front door.
It was only the postman’s knock, but the postman was an unfamiliar visitor in that house, and Mrs. Bunting started violently. She was nervous, that’s what was the matter with her,—so she told herself angrily. No doubt this was a letter for Mr. Sleuth; the lodger must have relations and acquaintances somewhere in the world. All gentlefolk have. But when she picked the small envelope off the hall floor, she saw it was a letter from Daisy, her husband’s daughter.
“Bunting!” she called out sharply. “Here’s a letter for you.”
She opened the door of their sitting-room and looked in. Yes, there was her husband, sitting back comfortably in his easy chair, reading a paper. And as she saw his broad, rather rounded back, Mrs. Bunting felt a sudden thrill of sharp irritation. There he was, doing nothing—in fact, doing worse than nothing—wasting his time reading all about those horrid crimes.
She sighed—a long, unconscious sigh. Bunting was getting into idle ways, bad ways for a man of his years. But how could she prevent it? He had been such an active, conscientious sort of man when they had first made acquaintance. . .
She also could remember, even more clearly than Bunting did himself, that first meeting of theirs in the dining-room of No. 90 Cumberland Terrace. As she had stood there, pouring out her mistress’s glass of port wine, she had not been too much absorbed in her task to have a good out-of-her-eye look at the spruce, nice, respectable-looking fellow who was standing over by the window. How superior he had appeared even then to the man she already hoped he would succeed as butler!