Suddenly the door in front of him opened, and he beard a familiar voice saying crossly, yet anxiously, “What on earth are you doing out there, Bunting?  Come in—­do!  You’ll catch your death of cold!  I don’t want to have you ill on my hands as well as everything else!” Mrs. Bunting rarely uttered so many words at once nowadays.

He walked in through the front door of his cheerless house.  “I went out to get a paper,” he said sullenly.

After all, he was master.  He had as much right to spend the money as she had; for the matter of that the money on which they were now both living had been lent, nay, pressed on him—­not on Ellen—­by that decent young chap, Joe Chandler.  And he, Bunting, had done all he could; he had pawned everything he could pawn, while Ellen, so he resentfully noticed, still wore her wedding ring.

He stepped past her heavily, and though she said nothing, he knew she grudged him his coming joy.  Then, full of rage with her and contempt for himself, and giving himself the luxury of a mild, a very mild, oath—­Ellen had very early made it clear she would have no swearing in her presence—­he lit the hall gas full-flare.

“How can we hope to get lodgers if they can’t even see the card?” he shouted angrily.

And there was truth in what he said, for now that he had lit the gas, the oblong card, though not the word “Apartments” printed on it, could be plainly seen out-lined against the old-fashioned fanlight above the front door.

Bunting went into the sitting-room, silently followed by his wife, and then, sitting down in his nice arm-chair, he poked the little banked-up fire.  It was the first time Bunting had poked the fire for many a long day, and this exertion of marital authority made him feel better.  A man has to assert himself sometimes, and he, Bunting, had not asserted himself enough lately.

A little colour came into Mrs. Bunting’s pale face.  She was not used to be flouted in this way.  For Bunting, when not thoroughly upset, was the mildest of men.

She began moving about the room, flicking off an imperceptible touch of dust here, straightening a piece of furniture there.

But her hands trembled—­they trembled with excitement, with self-pity, with anger.  A penny?  It was dreadful—­dreadful to have to worry about a penny!  But they had come to the point when one has to worry about pennies.  Strange that her husband didn’t realise that.

Bunting looked round once or twice; he would have liked to ask Ellen to leave off fidgeting, but he was fond of peace, and perhaps, by now, a little bit ashamed of himself, so he refrained from remark, and she soon gave over what irritated him of her own accord.

But Mrs. Bunting did not come and sit down as her husband would have liked her to do.  The sight of him, absorbed in his paper as he was, irritated her, and made her long to get away from him.  Opening the door which separated the sitting-room from the bedroom behind, and —­shutting out the aggravating vision of Bunting sitting comfortably by the now brightly burning fire, with the Evening Standard spread out before him—­she sat down in the cold darkness, and pressed her hands against her temples.