It had at once become clear that the lodger preferred to be waited on only by one person, and that person his landlady.  He gave her very little trouble.  Indeed, it did her good having to wait on the lodger; it even did her good that he was not like other gentlemen; for the fact occupied her mind, and in a way it amused her.  The more so that whatever his oddities Mr. Sleuth had none of those tiresome, disagreeable ways with which landladies are only too familiar, and which seem peculiar only to those human beings who also happen to be lodgers.  To take but one point:  Mr. Sleuth did not ask to be called unduly early.  Bunting and his Ellen had fallen into the way of lying rather late in the morning, and it was a great comfort not to have to turn out to make the lodger a cup of tea at seven, or even half-past seven.  Mr. Sleuth seldom required anything before eleven.

But odd he certainly was.

The second evening he had been with them Mr. Sleuth had brought in a book of which the queer name was Cruden’s Concordance.  That and the Bible—­Mrs. Bunting had soon discovered that there was a relation between the two books—­seemed to be the lodger’s only reading.  He spent hours each day, generally after he had eaten the breakfast which also served for luncheon, poring over the Old Testament and over that strange kind of index to the Book.

As for the delicate and yet the all-important question of money, Mr. Sleuth was everything—­everything that the most exacting landlady could have wished.  Never had there been a more confiding or trusting gentleman.  On the very first day he had been with them he had allowed his money—­the considerable sum of one hundred and eighty-four sovereigns—­to lie about wrapped up in little pieces of rather dirty newspaper on his dressing-table.  That had quite upset Mrs. Bunting.  She had allowed herself respectfully to point out to him that what he was doing was foolish, indeed wrong.  But as only answer he had laughed, and she had been startled when the loud, unusual and discordant sound had issued from his thin lips.

“I know those I can trust,” he had answered, stuttering rather, as was his way when moved.  “And—­and I assure you, Mrs. Bunting, that I hardly have to speak to a human being—­especially to a woman” (and he had drawn in his breath with a hissing sound) “before I know exactly what manner of person is before me.”

It hadn’t taken the landlady very long to find out that her lodger had a queer kind of fear and dislike of women.  When she was doing the staircase and landings she would often hear Mr. Sleuth reading aloud to himself passages in the Bible that were very uncomplimentary to her sex.  But Mrs. Bunting had no very great opinion of her sister woman, so that didn’t put her out.  Besides, where one’s lodger is concerned, a dislike of women is better than—­well, than the other thing.

In any case, where would have been the good of worrying about the lodger’s funny ways?  Of course, Mr. Sleuth was eccentric.  If he hadn’t been, as Bunting funnily styled it, “just a leetle touched upstairs,” he wouldn’t be here, living this strange, solitary life in lodgings.  He would be living in quite a different sort of way with some of his relatives, or with a friend of his own class.