Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/92



Perhaps because his luncheon was served to him a good deal later than usual, Mr. Sleuth ate his nice piece of steamed sole upstairs with far heartier an appetite than his landlady had eaten her nice slice of roast pork downstairs.

"I hope you’re feeling a little better, sir," Mrs. Bunting had forced herself to say when she first took in his tray.

And he had answered plaintively, querulously, "No, I can’t say I feel well to-day, Mrs. Bunting. I am tired—very tired. And as I lay in bed I seemed to hear so many sounds—so much crying and shouting. I trust the Marylebone Road is not going to become a noisy thoroughfare, Mrs. Bunting?"

"Oh, no, sir, I don’t think that. We’re generally reckoned very quiet indeed, sir."

She waited a moment—try as she would, she could not allude to what those unwonted shouts and noises had betokened. "I expect you’ve got a chill, sir," she said suddenly. "If I was you, I shouldn’t go out this afternoon; I’d just stay quietly indoors. There’s a lot of rough people about" Perhaps there was an undercurrent of warning, of painful pleading, in her toneless voice which penetrated in some way to the brain