“Indeed?  Well, so long!”

After his wife had let their friend out, Bunting said cheerfully, “Joe seems to like our Daisy, eh, Ellen?”

But Mrs. Bunting shook her head scornfully.  She did not exactly dislike the girl, though she did not hold with the way Bunting’s daughter was being managed by that old aunt of hers—­an idle, good-for-nothing way, very different from the fashion in which she herself had been trained at the Foundling, for Mrs. Bunting as a little child had known no other home, no other family than those provided by good Captain Coram.

“Joe Chandler’s too sensible a young chap to be thinking of girls yet awhile,” she said tartly.

“No doubt you’re right,” Bunting agreed.  “Times be changed.  In my young days chaps always had time for that.  ’Twas just a notion that came into my head, hearing him asking, anxious-like, after her.”

******

About five o’clock, after the street lamps were well alight, Mr. Sleuth went out, and that same evening there came two parcels addressed to his landlady.  These parcels contained clothes.  But it was quite clear to Mrs. Bunting’s eyes that they were not new clothes.  In fact, they had evidently been bought in some good second-hand clothes-shop.  A funny thing for a real gentleman like Mr. Sleuth to do!  It proved that he had given up all hope of getting back his lost luggage.

When the lodger had gone out he had not taken his bag with him, of that Mrs. Bunting was positive.  And yet, though she searched high and low for it, she could not find the place where Mr. Sleuth kept it.  And at last, had it not been that she was a very clear-headed woman, with a good memory, she would have been disposed to think that the bag had never existed, save in her imagination.

But no, she could not tell herself that!  She remembered exactly how it had looked when Mr. Sleuth had first stood, a strange, queer-looking figure of a man, on her doorstep.

She further remembered how he had put the bag down on the floor of the top front room, and then, forgetting what he had done, how he had asked her eagerly, in a tone of angry fear, where the bag was —­only to find it safely lodged at his feet!

As time went on Mrs. Bunting thought a great deal about that bag, for, strange and amazing fact, she never saw Mr. Sleuth’s bag again.  But, of course, she soon formed a theory as to its whereabouts.  The brown leather bag which had formed Mr. Sleuth’s only luggage the afternoon of his arrival was almost certainly locked up in the lower part of the drawing-room chiffonnier.  Mr. Sleuth evidently always carried the key of the little corner cupboard about his person; Mrs. Bunting had also had a good hunt for that key, but, as was the case with the bag, the key disappeared, and she never saw either the one or the other again.

CHAPTER V

How quietly, how uneventfully, how pleasantly, sped the next few days.  Already life was settling down into a groove.  Waiting on Mr. Sleuth was just what Mrs. Bunting could manage to do easily, and without tiring herself.