“What shall I do if Mr. Sleuth rings?” asked Bunting, rather nervously. It was the first time since the lodger had come to them that Ellen had offered to go out in the morning.
She hesitated. In her anxiety to have the matter of Daisy settled, she had forgotten Mr. Sleuth. Strange that she should have done so—strange, and, to herself, very comfortable and pleasant.
“Oh, well, you can just go up and knock at the door and say I’ll be back in a few minutes—that I had to go out with a message. He’s quite a reasonable gentleman.” She went into the back room to put on her bonnet and thick jacket for it was very cold—getting colder every minute.
As she stood, buttoning her gloves—she wouldn’t have gone out untidy for the world—Bunting suddenly came across to her. “Give us a kiss, old girl,” he said. And his wife turned up her face.
“One ’ud think it was catching!” she said, but there was a lilt in her voice.
“So it is,” Bunting briefly answered. “Didn’t that old cook get married just after us? She’d never ’a thought of it if it hadn’t been for you!”
But once she was out, walking along the damp, uneven pavement, Mr. Sleuth revenged himself for his landlady’s temporary forgetfulness.
During the last two days the lodger had been queer, odder than usual, unlike himself, or, rather, very much as he had been some ten days ago, just before that double murder had taken place.
The night before, while Daisy was telling all about the dreadful place to which Joe Chandler had taken her and her father, Mrs. Bunting had heard Mr. Sleuth moving about overhead, restlessly walking up and down his sitting-room. And later, when she took up his supper, she had listened a moment outside the door, while he read aloud some of the texts his soul delighted in—terrible texts telling of the grim joys attendant on revenge.
Mrs. Bunting was so absorbed in her thoughts, so possessed with the curious personality of her lodger, that she did not look where she was going, and suddenly a young woman bumped up against her.