Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/110

Rh "Perhaps he was a horrid man, and deserved to be done away with," said Daisy. The idea struck them both as so very comic that they began to laugh aloud in unison.

"Did you ever hear what a certain Mrs. Pearce did?" asked Chandler, becoming suddenly serious.

"Oh, yes," said Daisy, and she shuddered a little. "That was the wicked, wicked woman what killed a pretty little baby and its mother. They’ve got her in Madame Tussaud’s. But Ellen, she won’t let me go to the Chamber of Horrors. She wouldn’t let father take me there last time I was in London. Cruel of her, I called it. But somehow I don’t feel as if I wanted to go there now, after having been here!"

"Well," said Chandler slowly, "we’ve a case full of relics of Mrs. Pearce. But the pram the bodies were found in, that’s at Madame Tussaud’s—at least so they claim, I can’t say. Now here’s something just as curious, and not near so dreadful. See that man’s jacket there?"

"Yes," said Daisy falteringly. She was beginning to feel oppressed, frightened. She no longer wondered that the Indian gentleman had been taken queer.

"A burglar shot a man dead who’d disturbed him, and by mistake he went and left that jacket behind him. Our people noticed that one of the buttons was broken in two. Well, that don’t seem much of a clue, does it, Miss Daisy? Will you believe me when I tells you that that other bit of button was discovered, and that it hanged the fellow? And ’twas the more wonderful because all three buttons was different!"

Daisy stared wonderingly, down at the little broken