It must have been about four o’clock when there came a ring at the front door.
The three were sitting chatting together, for Daisy had washed up—she really was saving her stepmother a good bit of trouble—and the girl was now amusing her elders by a funny account of Old Aunt’s pernickety ways.
“Whoever can that be?” said Bunting, looking up. “It’s too early for Joe Chandler, surely.”
“I’ll go,” said his wife, hurriedly jumping up from her chair. “I’ll go! We don’t want no strangers in here.”
And as she stepped down the short bit of passage she said to herself, “A clue? What clue?”
But when she opened the front door a glad sigh of relief broke from her. “Why, Joe? We never thought ’twas you! But you’re very welcome, I’m sure. Come in.”
And Chandler came in, a rather sheepish look on his good-looking, fair young face.
“I thought maybe that Mr. Bunting would like to know—” he began, in a loud, cheerful voice, and Mrs. Bunting hurriedly checked him. She didn’t want the lodger upstairs to hear what young Chandler might be going to say.
“Don’t talk so loud,” she said a little sharply. “The lodger is not very well to-day. He’s had a cold,” she added hastily, “and during the last two or three days he hasn’t been able to go out.”
She wondered at her temerity, her—her hypocrisy, and that moment, those few words, marked an epoch in Ellen Bunting’s life. It was the first time she had told a bold and deliberate lie. She was one of those women—there are many, many such—to whom there is a whole world of difference between the suppression of the truth and the utterance of an untruth.