CHAPTER XX

It was not late even now, for the inquest had begun very punctually, but Mrs. Bunting felt that no power on earth should force her to go to Ealing.  She felt quite tired out and as if she could think of nothing.

Pacing along very slowly, as if she were an old, old woman, she began listlessly turning her steps towards home.  Somehow she felt that it would do her more good to stay out in the air than take the train.  Also she would thus put off the moment—­the moment to which she looked forward with dread and dislike—­when she would have to invent a circumstantial story as to what she had said to the doctor, and what the doctor had said to her.

Like most men and women of his class, Bunting took a great interest in other people’s ailments, the more interest that he was himself so remarkably healthy.  He would feel quite injured if Ellen didn’t tell him everything that had happened; everything, that is, that the doctor had told her.

As she walked swiftly along, at every corner, or so it seemed to her, and outside every public-house, stood eager boys selling the latest edition of the afternoon papers to equally eager buyers.  “Avenger Inquest?” they shouted exultantly.  “All the latest evidence!” At one place, where there were a row of contents-bills pinned to the pavement by stones, she stopped and looked down.  “Opening of the Avenger Inquest.  What is he really like?  Full description.”  On yet another ran the ironic query:  “Avenger Inquest.  Do you know him?”

And as that facetious question stared up at her in huge print, Mrs. Bunting turned sick—­so sick and faint that she did what she had never done before in her life—­she pushed her way into a public-house, and, putting two pennies down on the counter, asked for, and received, a glass of cold water.

As she walked along the now gas-lit streets, she found her mind dwelling persistently—­not on the inquest at which she had been present, not even on The Avenger, but on his victims.

Shudderingly, she visualised the two cold bodies lying in the mortuary.  She seemed also to see that third body, which, though cold, must yet be warmer than the other two, for at this time yesterday The Avenger’s last victim had been alive, poor soul—­ alive and, according to a companion of hers whom the papers had already interviewed, particularly merry and bright.

Hitherto Mrs. Bunting had been spared in any real sense a vision of The Avenger’s victims.  Now they haunted her, and she wondered wearily if this fresh horror was to be added to the terrible fear which encompassed her night and day.

As she came within sight of home, her spirit suddenly lightened.  The narrow, drab-coloured little house, flanked each side by others exactly like it in every single particular, save that their front yards were not so well kept, looked as if it could, aye, and would, keep any secret closely hidden.