She stooped down and touched the stuff.  It showed red, bright red, on her finger.

Mrs. Bunting grew chalky white, then recovered herself quickly.  In fact the colour rushed into her face, and she grew hot all over.

It was only a bottle of red ink she had upset—­that was all!  How could she have thought it was anything else?

It was the more silly of her—­so she told herself in scornful condemnation—­because she knew that the lodger used red ink.  Certain pages of Cruden’s Concordance were covered with notes written in Mr. Sleuth’s peculiar upright handwriting.  In fact in some places you couldn’t see the margin, so closely covered was it with remarks and notes of interrogation.

Mr. Sleuth had foolishly placed his bottle of red ink in the chiffonnier—­that was what her poor, foolish gentleman had done; and it was owing to her inquisitiveness, her restless wish to know things she would be none the better, none the happier, for knowing, that this accident had taken place.

She mopped up with her duster the few drops of ink which had fallen on the green carpet and then, still feeling, as she angrily told herself, foolishly upset she went once more into the back room.

It was curious that Mr. Sleuth possessed no notepaper.  She would have expected him to have made that one of his first purchases—­the more so that paper is so very cheap, especially that rather dirty-looking grey Silurian paper.  Mrs. Bunting had once lived with a lady who always used two kinds of notepaper, white for her friends and equals, grey for those whom she called “common people.”  She, Ellen Green, as she then was, had always resented the fact.  Strange she should remember it now, stranger in a way because that employer of her’s had not been a real lady, and Mr. Sleuth, whatever his peculiarities, was, in every sense of the word, a real gentleman.  Somehow Mrs. Bunting felt sure that if he had bought any notepaper it would have been white—­white and probably cream-laid—­not grey and cheap.

Again she opened the drawer of the old-fashioned wardrobe and lifted up the few pieces of underclothing Mr. Sleuth now possessed.

But there was nothing there—­nothing, that is, hidden away.  When one came to think of it there seemed something strange in the notion of leaving all one’s money where anyone could take it, and in locking up such a valueless thing as a cheap sham leather bag, to say nothing of a bottle of ink.

Mrs. Bunting once more opened out each of the tiny drawers below the looking-glass, each delicately fashioned of fine old mahogany.  Mr. Sleuth kept his money in the centre drawer.

The glass had only cost seven-and-sixpence, and, after the auction a dealer had come and offered her first fifteen shillings, and then a guinea for it.  Not long ago, in Baker Street, she had seen a looking-glass which was the very spit of this one, labeled “Chippendale, Antique.  L21 5s 0d.”