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 way this evening, all the more welcome because it was quite unexpected!  The young lady at whose birthday party he had been present in capacity of waiter had come into a fortune that day, and she had had the gracious, the surprising thought of presenting each of the hired waiters with a sovereign!

This gift, which had been accompanied by a few kind words, had gone to Bunting’s heart.  It had confirmed him in his Conservative principles; only gentlefolk ever behaved in that way; quiet, old-fashioned, respectable, gentlefolk, the sort of people of whom those nasty Radicals know nothing and care less!

But the ex-butler was not as happy as he should have been.  Slackening his footsteps, he began to think with puzzled concern of how queer his wife had seemed lately.  Ellen had become so nervous, so “jumpy,” that he didn’t know what to make of her sometimes.  She had never been really good-tempered—­your capable, self-respecting woman seldom is—­but she had never been like what she was now.  And she didn’t get better as the days went on; in fact she got worse.  Of late she had been quite hysterical, and for no reason at all!  Take that little practical joke of young Joe Chandler.  Ellen knew quite well he often had to go about in some kind of disguise, and yet how she had gone on, quite foolish-like—­not at all as one would have expected her to do.

There was another queer thing about her which disturbed him in more senses than one.  During the last three weeks or so Ellen had taken to talking in her sleep.  “No, no, no!” she had cried out, only the night before.  “It isn’t true—­I won’t have it said—­it’s a lie!” And there had been a wail of horrible fear and revolt in her usually quiet, mincing voice.

******

Whew! it was cold; and he had stupidly forgotten his gloves.

He put his hands in his pockets to keep them warm, and began walking more quickly.

As he tramped steadily along, the ex-butler suddenly caught sight of his lodger walking along the opposite side of the solitary street —­one of those short streets leading off the broad road which encircles Regent’s Park.