Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/301

Rh "No," she answered indifferently, "I don’t know that I ever heard of him."

She felt slightly—oh, very sightly—uneasy about Daisy. She would have liked her stepdaughter to keep well within sight and sound, but Mr. Sleuth was now taking the girl down to the other end of the room.

"Well, I hope you never will know him—not in any personal sense, Mrs. Bunting." The man chuckled. "He’s the Commissioner of Police—the new one—that’s what Sir John Burney is. One of the gentlemen he’s showing round our place is the Paris Police boss—whose job is on all fours, so to speak, with Sir John’s. The Frenchy has brought his daughter with him, and there are several other ladies. Ladies always likes horrors, Mrs. Bunting; that’s our experience here. ‘Oh, take me to the Chamber of Horrors’—that’s what they say the minute they gets into this here building!"

Mrs. Bunting looked at him thoughtfully. It occurred to Mr. Hopkins that she was very wan and tired; she used to look better in the old days, when she was still in service, before Bunting married her.

"Yes," she said; "that’s just what my stepdaughter said just now. ‘Oh, take me to the Chamber of Horrors’—that’s exactly what she did say when we got upstairs."

A group of people, all talking and laughing together, were advancing, from within the wooden barrier, toward the turnstile.

Mrs. Bunting stared at them nervously. She wondered which of them was the gentleman with whom Mr.