weth not that the dead are there,
and that her guests are in the depths of hell.'"

There was a long pause. Mrs. Bunting could hear the leaves of
her Bible being turned over, eagerly, busily; and then again Mr.
Sleuth broke out, this time in a softer voice:

"'She hath cast down many wounded from her; yea, many strong men
have been slain by her.'" And in a softer, lower, plaintive tone
came the words: "'I applied my heart to know, and to search, and
to seek out wisdom and the reason of things; and to know the
wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness.'"

And as she stood there listening, a feeling of keen distress, of
spiritual oppression, came over Mrs. Bunting. For the first time
in her life she visioned the infinite mystery, the sadness and
strangeness, of human life.

Poor Mr. Sleuth--poor unhappy, distraught Mr. Sleuth! An
overwhelming pity blotted out for a moment the fear, aye, and the
loathing, she had been feeling for her lodger.

She knocked at the door, and then she took up her tray.

"Come in, Mrs. Bunting." Mr. Sleuth's voice sounded feebler, more
toneless than usual.

She turned the handle of the door and walked in. The lodger was
not sitting in his usual place; he had taken the little round table
on which his candle generally rested when he read in bed, out of
his bedroom, and placed it over by the drawing-room window. On it
were placed, open, the Bible and the Concordance. But as his
landlady came in, Mr. Sleuth hastily closed the Bible, and began
staring dreamily out of the window, down at the sordid, hurrying
crowd of men and women which now swept along the Marylebone Road.

"There seem a great many people out today," he observed, without
looking round.

"Yes, sir, there do."

Mrs. Bunting began busying herself with laying the cloth and
putting out the breakfast-lunch, and as she did so she was seized
with a mortal, instinctive terror of the man sitting there.

At last Mr. Sleuth got up and turned round. She forced herself to
look at him. How tired, how worn, he looked, and--how strange!

Walking towards the table on which lay his meal, he rubbed his hands
together with a nervous gesture--it was a gesture he only made when
something had pleased, nay, satisfied him. Mrs. Bunting, looking at
him, remembered that he had rubbed his hands together thus when he
had first seen the room upstairs, and realised that it contained a
large gas-stove and a convenient sink.

What Mr. Sleu