t loud, tremulous, uncertain double
knock; not a knock, so the listener told herself, that boded any
good. Would-be lodgers gave sharp, quick, bold, confident raps.
No; this must be some kind of beggar. The queerest people came at
all hours, and asked--whining or threatening--for money.

Mrs. Bunting had had some sinister experiences with men and women
--especially women--drawn from that nameless, mysterious class
made up of the human flotsam and jetsam which drifts about every
great city. But since she had taken to leaving the gas in the
passage unlit at night she had been very little troubled with that
kind of visitors, those human bats which are attracted by any kind
of light but leave alone those who live in darkness.

She opened the door of the sitting-room. It was Bunting's place
to go to the front door, but she knew far better than he did how
to deal with difficult or obtrusive callers. Still, somehow, she
would have liked him to go to-night. But Bunting sat on, absorbed
in his newspaper; all he did at the sound of the bedroom door
opening was to look up and say, "Didn't you hear a knock?"

Without answering his question she went out into the hall.

Slowly she opened the front door.

On the top of the three steps which led up to the door, there stood
the long, lanky figure of a man, clad in an Inverness cape and an
old-fashioned top hat. He waited for a few seconds blinking at her,
perhaps dazzled by the light of the gas in the passage. Mrs.
Bunting's trained perception told her at once that this man, odd as
he looked, was a gentleman, belonging by birth to the class with
whom her former employment had brought her in contact.

"Is it not a fact that you let lodgings?" he asked, and there was
something shrill, unbalanced, hesitating, in his voice.

"Yes, sir," she said uncertainly--it was a long, long time since
anyone had come after their lodgings, anyone, that is, that they
could think of taking into their respectable house.

Instinctively she stepped a little to one side, and the stranger
walked past her, and so into the hall.

And then, for the first time, Mrs. Bunting noticed that he held a
narrow bag in his left hand. It was quite a new bag, made of strong
brown leather.

"I am looking for some quiet rooms," he said; then he repeated the
words, "quiet rooms," in a dreamy, absent way, and as he uttered
them he looked nervously round him.

Then his sallow face brightened, for the hall had been ca