Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/233

Rh tears in her eyes. She was trembling with excitement and emotion. "You have been good to me."

"Oh, that’s nothing," he said a little awkwardly. "I expect you went though a pretty bad time, didn’t you?"

"Will they be having that old gentleman again?" she spoke in a whisper, and looked up at him with a pleading, agonised look.

"Good Lord, no! Crazy old fool! We’re troubled with a lot of those sort of people, you know, ma’am, and they often do have funny names, too. You see, that sort is busy all their lives in the City, or what not; then they retires when they gets about sixty, and they’re fit to hang themselves with dulness. Why, there’s hundreds of lunies of the sort to be met in London. You can’t go about at night and not meet ’em. Plenty of ’em!"

"Then you don’t think there was anything in what he said?" she ventured.

"In what that old gent said? Goodness—no!" he laughed good-naturedly. "But I’ll tell you what I do think. If it wasn’t for the time that had gone by, I should believe that the second witness had seen that crafty devil—" he lowered his voice. "But, there, Dr. Gaunt declares most positively—so did two other medical gentlemen—that the poor creatures had been dead hours when they was found. Medical gentlemen are always very positive about their evidence. They have to be—otherwise who’d believe ’em? If we’d time I could tell you of a case in which—well, ’twas all because of Dr. Gaunt that the murderer escaped. We all knew