Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/161

Rh lodger’s quick, singularly quiet progress—"stealthy" she called it to herself—through the fog-filled, lamp-lit hall. Yes, now he was going up the staircase. What was that Bunting was saying?

"It isn’t safe for decent folk to be out in such weather—no, that it ain’t, not unless they have something to do that won’t wait till to-morrow." The speaker was looking straight into his wife’s narrow, colourless face. Bunting was an obstinate man, and liked to prove himself right. "I’ve a good mind to speak to him about it, that I have! He ought to be told that it isn’t safe—not for the sort of man he is—to be wandering about the streets at night. I read you out the accidents in Lloyd’s—shocking, they were, and all brought about by the fog! And then, that horrid monster ’ull soon be at his work again"

"Monster?" repeated Mrs. Bunting absently.

She was trying to hear the lodger’s footsteps overhead. She was very curious to know whether he had gone into his nice sitting-room, or straight upstairs, to that cold experiment-room, as he now always called it.

But her husband went on as if he had not heard her, and she gave up trying to listen to what was going on above.

"It wouldn’t be very pleasant to run up against such a party as that in the fog, eh, Ellen?" He spoke as if the notion had a certain pleasant thrill in it after all.

"What stuff you do talk!" said Mrs. Bunting sharply. And then she got up. Her husband’s remarks had disturbed her. Why couldn’t they talk of something pleasant when they did have a quiet bit of time together?

Bunting looked down again at his paper, and she