Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/78

68 As he had done the other evening, Mr. and Mrs. Bunting’s visitor stopped at the door. "Any news of Miss Daisy?" he asked casually.

"Yes; she’s coming to-morrow," said her father. "They’ve got scarlet fever at her place. So Old Aunt thinks she’d better clear out."

The husband and wife went to bed early that night, but Mrs. Bunting found she could not sleep. She lay wide awake, hearing the hours, the half-hours, the quarters chime out from the belfry of the old church close by.

And then, just as she was dozing off—it must have been about one o’clock—she heard the sound she had half unconsciously been expecting to hear, that of the lodger’s stealthy footsteps coming down the stairs just outside her room.

He crept along the passage and let himself out very, very quietly…

But though she tried to keep awake, Mrs. Bunting did not hear him come in again, for she soon fell into a heavy sleep.

Oddly enough, she was the first to wake the next morning; odder still, it was she, not Bunting, who jumped out of bed, and going out into the passage, picked up the newspaper which had just been pushed through the letter-box.

But having picked it up, Mrs. Bunting did not go back at once into her bedroom. Instead she lit the gas in the passage, and leaning up against the wall to steady herself, for she was trembling with cold and fatigue, she opened the paper.