Mr. Sleuth never stinted himself as to food, or stinted them, his landlord and his landlady, as to what he had said he would pay. And Mrs. Bunting’s conscience pricked her a little, for he hardly ever used that room upstairs—that room for which he had paid extra so generously. If Bunting got another job or two through that nasty man in Baker Street—and now that the ice had been broken between them it was very probable that he would do so, for he was a very well-trained, experienced waiter—then she thought she would tell Mr. Sleuth that she no longer wanted him to pay as much as he was now doing.
She looked anxiously, deprecatingly, at his long, bent back.
“Good night, sir,” she said at last.
Mr. Sleuth turned round. His face looked sad and worn.
“I hope you’ll sleep well, sir.”
“Yes, I’m sure I shall sleep well. But perhaps I shall take a little turn first. Such is my way, Mrs. Bunting; after I have been studying all day I require a little exercise.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go out tonight,” she said deprecatingly. “ ’Tisn’t fit for anyone to be out in the bitter cold.”
“And yet—and yet”—he looked at her attentively—“there will probably be many people out in the streets tonight.”
“A many more than usual, I fear, sir.”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Sleuth quickly. “Is it not a strange thing, Mrs. Bunting, that people who have all day in which to amuse themselves should carry their revels far into the night?”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of revellers, sir; I was thinking”—she hesitated, then, with a gasping effort Mrs. Bunting brought out the words, “of the police.”
“The police?” He put up his right hand and stroked his chin two or three times with a nervous gesture. “But what is man—what is man’s puny power or strength against that of God, or even of those over whose feet God has set a guard?”
Mr. Sleuth looked at his landlady with a kind of triumph lighting up his face, and Mrs. Bunting felt a shuddering sense of relief. Then she had not offended her lodger? She had not made him angry by that, that—was it a hint she had meant to convey to him?
“Very true, sir,” she said respectfully. “But Providence means us to take care o’ ourselves too.” And then she closed the door behind her and went downstairs.
But Mr. Sleuth’s landlady did not go on, down to the kitchen. She came into her sitting-room, and, careless of what Bunting would think the next morning, put the tray with the remains of the lodger’s meal on her table. Having done that, and having turned out the gas in the passage and the sitting-room, she went into her bedroom and closed the door.
The fire was burning brightly and clearly. She told herself that she did not need any other light to undress by.
What was it made the flames of the fire shoot up, shoot down, in that queer way? But watching it for awhile, she did at last doze off a bit.
And then—and then Mrs. Bunting woke with a sudden thumping of her heart. Woke to see that the fire was almost out—woke to hear a quarter to twelve chime out—woke at last to the sound she had been listening for before she fell asleep—the sound of Mr. Sleuth, wearing his rubber-soled shoes, creeping downstairs, along the passage, and so out, very, very quietly by the front door.
But once she was in bed Mrs. Bunting turned restless. She tossed this way and that, full of discomfort and unease. Perhaps it was the unaccustomed firelight dancing on the walls, making queer shadows all round her, which kept her so wide awake.
She lay thinking and listening—listening and thinking. It even occurred to her to do the one thing that might have quieted her excited brain—to get a book, one of those detective stories of which Bunting had a slender store in the next room, and then, lighting the gas, to sit up and read.
No, Mrs. Bunting had always been told it was very wrong to read in bed, and she was not in a mood just now to begin doing anything that she had been told was wrong. …
XXI
It was a very cold night—so cold, so windy, so snow-laden was the atmosphere, that everyone who could do so stayed indoors.
Bunting, however, was now on his way home from what had proved a really pleasant job. A remarkable piece of luck had come his way this evening, all the more welcome because it was quite unexpected! The young lady at whose birthday party he had been present in capacity of waiter had come into a fortune that day, and she had had the gracious, the surprising thought of presenting each of the hired waiters with a sovereign!
This gift, which had been accompanied by a few kind words, had gone to Bunting’s heart. It had confirmed him in his Conservative principles; only gentlefolk ever behaved in that way; quiet, old-fashioned, respectable, gentlefolk, the sort of people of whom those nasty Radicals know nothing and care less!
But the ex-butler was not as happy as he should have been. Slackening his footsteps, he began to think with puzzled concern of how queer his wife had seemed lately. Ellen had become so nervous, so “jumpy,” that he didn’t know what to make
