“I’m afraid, Mr. Bunting, that you must have felt something dirty, foul, on my coat?  It’s too long a story to tell you now, but I brushed up against a dead animal, a creature to whose misery some thoughtful soul had put an end, lying across a bench on Primrose Hill.”

“No, sir, no.  I didn’t notice nothing.  I scarcely touched you, sir.”

It seemed as if a power outside himself compelled Bunting to utter these lying words.  “And now, sir, I’ll be saying good-night to you,” he said.

Stepping back he pressed with all the strength that was in him against the wall, and let the other pass him.  There was a pause, and then—­“Good-night,” returned Mr. Sleuth, in a hollow voice.  Bunting waited until the lodger had gone upstairs, and then, lighting the gas, he sat down there, in the hall.  Mr. Sleuth’s landlord felt very queer—­queer and sick.

He did not draw his left hand out of his pocket till he heard Mr. Sleuth shut the bedroom door upstairs.  Then he held up his left hand and looked at it curiously; it was flecked, streaked with pale reddish blood.

Taking off his boots, he crept into the room where his wife lay asleep.  Stealthily he walked across to the wash-hand-stand, and dipped a hand into the water-jug.

“Whatever are you doing?  What on earth are you doing?” came a voice from the bed, and Bunting started guiltily.

“I’m just washing my hands.”

“Indeed, you’re doing nothing of the sort!  I never heard of such a thing—­putting your hand into the water in which I was going to wash my face to-morrow morning!”

“I’m very sorry, Ellen,” he said meekly; “I meant to throw it away.  You don’t suppose I would have let you wash in dirty water, do you?”

She said no more, but, as he began undressing himself, Mrs. Bunting lay staring at him in a way that made her husband feel even more uncomfortable than he was already.

At last he got into bed.  He wanted to break the oppressive silence by telling Ellen about the sovereign the young lady had given him, but that sovereign now seemed to Bunting of no more account than if it had been a farthing he had picked up in the road outside.

Once more his wife spoke, and he gave so great a start that it shook the bed.

“I suppose that you don’t know that you’ve left the light burning in the hall, wasting our good money?” she observed tartly.

He got up painfully and opened the door into the passage.  It was as she had said; the gas was flaring away, wasting their good money—­or, rather, Mr. Sleuth’s good money.  Since he had come to be their lodger they had not had to touch their rent money.

Bunting turned out the light and groped his way back to the room, and so to bed.  Without speaking again to each other, both husband and wife lay awake till dawn.

The next morning Mr. Sleuth’s landlord awoke with a start; he felt curiously heavy about the limbs, and tired about the eyes.