“This is just what I have been looking for.”  He walked with long, eager strides towards the gas stove.  “First-rate—­quite first-rate!  Exactly what I wanted to find!  You must understand, Mrs.—­er—­ Bunting, that I am a man of science.  I make, that is, all sorts of experiments, and I often require the—­ah, well, the presence of great heat.”

He shot out a hand, which she noticed shook a little, towards the stove.  “This, too, will be useful—­exceedingly useful, to me,” and he touched the edge of the stone sink with a lingering, caressing touch.

He threw his head back and passed his hand over his high, bare forehead; then, moving towards a chair, he sat down—­wearily.  “I’m tired,” he muttered in a low voice, “tired—­tired!  I’ve been walking about all day, Mrs. Bunting, and I could find nothing to sit down upon.  They do not put benches for tired men in the London streets.  They do so on the Continent.  In some ways they are far more humane on the Continent than they are in England, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Indeed, sir,” she said civilly; and then, after a nervous glance, she asked the question of which the answer would mean so much to her, “Then you mean to take my rooms, sir?”

“This room, certainly,” he said, looking round.  “This room is exactly what I have been looking for, and longing for, the last few days;” and then hastily he added, “I mean this kind of place is what I have always wanted to possess, Mrs. Bunting.  You would be surprised if you knew how difficult it is to get anything of the sort.  But now my weary search has ended, and that is a relief —­a very, very great relief to me!”

He stood up and looked round him with a dreamy, abstracted air.  And then, “Where’s my bag?” he asked suddenly, and there came a note of sharp, angry fear in his voice.  He glared at the quiet woman standing before him, and for a moment Mrs. Bunting felt a tremor of fright shoot through her.  It seemed a pity that Bunting was so far away, right down the house.

But Mrs. Bunting was aware that eccentricity has always been a perquisite, as it were the special luxury, of the well-born and of the well-educated.  Scholars, as she well knew, are never quite like other people, and her new lodger was undoubtedly a scholar.  “Surely I had a bag when I came in?” he said in a scared, troubled voice.

“Here it is, sir,” she said soothingly, and, stooping, picked it up and handed it to him.  And as she did so she noticed that the bag was not at all heavy; it was evidently by no means full.

He took it eagerly from her.  “I beg your pardon,” he muttered.  “But there is something in that bag which is very precious to me —­something I procured with infinite difficulty, and which I could never get again without running into great danger, Mrs. Bunting.  That must be the excuse for my late agitation.”

“About terms, sir?” she said a little timidly, returning to the subject which meant so much, so very much to her.