or even of those over
whose feet God has set a guard?"

Mr. Sleuth looked at his landlady with a kind of triumph lighting up
his face, and Mrs. Bunting felt a shuddering sense of relief. Then
she had not offended her lodger? She had not made him angry by that,
that--was it a hint she had meant to convey to him?

"Very true, sir," she said respectfully. "But Providence means us
to take care o' ourselves too." And then she closed the door behind
her and went downstairs.

But Mr. Sleuth's landlady did not go on, down to the kitchen. She
came into her sitting-room, and, careless of what Bunting would think
the next morning, put the tray with the remains of the lodger's meal on
her table. Having done that, and having turned out the gas in the
passage and the sitting-room, she went into her bedroom and closed the
door.

The fire was burning brightly and clearly. She told herself that
she did not need any other light to undress by.

What was it made the flames of the fire shoot up, shoot down, in
that queer way? But watching it for awhile, she did at last doze
off a bit.

And then--and then Mrs. Bunting woke with a sudden thumping of her
heart. Woke to see that the fire was almost out--woke to hear a
quarter to twelve chime out--woke at last to the sound she had been
listening for before she fell asleep--the sound of Mr. Sleuth,
wearing his rubber-soled shoes, creeping downstairs, along the
passage, and so out, very, very quietly by the front door.

But once she was in bed Mrs. Bunting turned restless. She tossed
this way and that, full of discomfort and unease. Perhaps it was
the unaccustomed firelight dancing on the walls, making queer shadows
all round her, which kept her so wide awake.

She lay thinking and listening--listening and thinking. It even
occurred to her to do the one thing that might have quieted her
excited brain--to get a book, one of those detective stories of
which Bunting had a slender store in the next room, and then,
lighting the gas, to sit up and read.

No, Mrs. Bunting had always been told it was very wrong to read in
bed, and she was not in a mood just now to begin doing anything that
she had been told was wrong. . . .

CHAPTER XXI

It was a very cold night--so cold, so windy, so snow-laden was the
atmosphere, that everyone who could do so stayed indoors.

Bunting, however, was now on his way home from what had proved a
really pleasant job. A remarkable piece of luck had come his