Slowly they made their way out of the building, and when they got home it was Daisy who described the strange way Mr. Sleuth had been taken.

“I don’t suppose he’ll be long before he comes home,” said Bunting heavily, and he cast an anxious, furtive look at his wife.  She looked as if stricken in a vital part; he saw from her face that there was something wrong—­very wrong indeed.

The hours dragged on.  All three felt moody and ill at ease.  Daisy knew there was no chance that young Chandler would come in to-day.

About six o’clock Mrs. Bunting went upstairs.  She lit the gas in Mr. Sleuth’s sitting-room and looked about her with a fearful glance.  Somehow everything seemed to speak to her of the lodger, there lay her Bible and his Concordance, side by side on the table, exactly as he had left them, when he had come downstairs and suggested that ill-starred expedition to his landlord’s daughter.  She took a few steps forward, listening the while anxiously for the familiar sound of the click in the door which would tell her that the lodger had come back, and then she went over to the window and looked out.

What a cold night for a man to be wandering about, homeless, friendless, and, as she suspected with a pang, with but very little money on him!

Turning abruptly, she went into the lodger’s bedroom and opened the drawer of the looking-glass.

Yes, there lay the much-diminished heap of sovereigns.  If only he had taken his money out with him!  She wondered painfully whether he had enough on his person to secure a good night’s lodging, and then suddenly she remembered that which brought relief to her mind.  The lodger had given something to that Hopkins fellow—­either a sovereign or half a sovereign, she wasn’t sure which.

The memory of Mr. Sleuth’s cruel words to her, of his threat, did not disturb her overmuch.  It had been a mistake—­all a mistake.  Far from betraying Mr. Sleuth, she had sheltered him—­kept his awful secret as she could not have kept it had she known, or even dimly suspected, the horrible fact with which Sir John Burney’s words had made her acquainted; namely, that Mr. Sleuth was victim of no temporary aberration, but that he was, and had been for years, a madman, a homicidal maniac.

In her ears there still rang the Frenchman’s half careless yet confident question, “De Leipsic and Liverpool man?”

Following a sudden impulse, she went back into the sitting-room, and taking a black-headed pin out of her bodice stuck it amid the leaves of the Bible.  Then she opened the Book, and looked at the page the pin had marked:—­

“My tabernacle is spoiled and all my cords are broken . . .  There is none to stretch forth my tent any more and to set up my curtains.”

At last leaving the Bible open, Mrs. Bunting went downstairs, and as she opened the door of her sitting-room Daisy came towards her stepmother.