If only he really knew!  If only he could feel quite sure!  And then he would tell himself that, after all, he had very little to go upon; only suspicion—­suspicion, and a secret, horrible certainty that his suspicion was justified.

And so at last Bunting began to long for a solution which he knew to be indefensible from every point of view; he began to hope, that is, in the depths of his heart, that the lodger would again go out one evening on his horrible business and be caught—­red-handed.

But far from going out on any business, horrible or other, Mr. Sleuth now never went out at all.  He kept upstairs, and often spent quite a considerable part of his day in bed.  He still felt, so he assured Mrs. Bunting, very far from well.  He had never thrown off the chill he had caught on that bitter night he and his landlord had met on their several ways home.

Joe Chandler, too, had become a terrible complication to Daisy’s father.  The detective spent every waking hour that he was not on duty with the Buntings; and Bunting, who at one time had liked him so well and so cordially, now became mortally afraid of him.

But though the young man talked of little else than The Avenger, and though on one evening he described at immense length the eccentric-looking gent who had given the barmaid a sovereign, picturing Mr. Sleuth with such awful accuracy that both Bunting and Mrs. Bunting secretly and separately turned sick when they listened to him, he never showed the slightest interest in their lodger.

At last there came a morning when Bunting and Chandler held a strange conversation about The Avenger.  The young fellow had come in earlier than usual, and just as he arrived Mrs. Bunting and Daisy were starting out to do some shopping.  The girl would fain have stopped behind, but her stepmother had given her a very peculiar, disagreeable look, daring her, so to speak, to be so forward, and Daisy had gone on with a flushed, angry look on her pretty face.

And then, as young Chandler stepped through into the sitting-room, it suddenly struck Bunting that the young man looked unlike himself —­indeed, to the ex-butler’s apprehension there was something almost threatening in Chandler’s attitude.

“I want a word with you, Mr. Bunting,” he began abruptly, falteringly.  “And I’m glad to have the chance now that Mrs. Bunting and Miss Daisy are out.”

Bunting braced himself to hear the awful words—­the accusation of having sheltered a murderer, the monster whom all the world was seeking, under his roof.  And then he remembered a phrase, a horrible legal phrase—­“Accessory after the fact.”  Yes, he had been that, there wasn’t any doubt about it!

“Yes?” he said.  “What is it, Joe?” and then the unfortunate man sat down in his chair.  “Yes?” he said again uncertainly; for young Chandler had now advanced to the table, he was looking at Bunting fixedly—­the other thought threateningly.  “Well, out with it, Joe!  Don’t keep me in suspense.”