Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/65

Rh "What was he like?" she asked curiously.

"Well, that’s hard to answer. You see, there was such an awful fog. But there’s one thing they all agree about. He was carrying a bag"

"A bag?" repeated Mrs. Bunting, in a low voice. "Whatever sort of bag might it have been, Joe?"

There had come across her—just right in her middle, like—such a strange sensation, a curious kind of tremor, or fluttering.

She was at a loss to account for it.

"Just a hand-bag," said Joe Chandler vaguely. "A woman I spoke to—cross-examining her, like—who was positive she had seen him, said, ‘Just a tall, thin shadow—that’s what he was, a tall, thin shadow of a man—with a bag.’"

"With a bag?" repeated Mrs. Bunting absently. "How very strange and peculiar"

"Why, no, not strange at all. He has to carry the thing he does the deed with in something, Mrs. Bunting. We’ve always wondered how he hid it. They generally throws the knife or fire-arms away, you know."

"Do they, indeed?" Mrs. Bunting still spoke in that absent, wondering way. She was thinking that she really must try and see what the lodger had done with his bag. It was possible—in fact, when one came to think of it, it was very probable—that he had just lost it, being so forgetful a gentleman, on one of the days he had gone out, as she knew he was fond of doing, into the Regent’s Park.

"There’ll be a description circulated in an hour or two," went on Chandler. "Perhaps that’ll help catch