The house had remained so still you could have heard a pin drop.  Mr. Sleuth, lying snug in his nice warm bed upstairs, had not stirred.  Had he stirred his landlady was bound to have heard him, for his bed was, as we know, just above hers.  No, during those long hours of darkness Daisy’s light, regular breathing was all that had fallen on Mrs. Bunting’s ears.

And then her mind switched off Mr. Sleuth.  She made a determined effort to expel him, to toss him, as it were, out of her thoughts.

It seemed strange that The Avenger had stayed his hand, for, as Joe had said only last evening, it was full time that he should again turn that awful, mysterious searchlight of his on himself.  Mrs. Bunting always visioned The Avenger as a black shadow in the centre a bright blinding light—­but the shadow had no form or definite substance.  Sometimes he looked like one thing, sometimes like another . . .

Mrs. Bunting had now come to the corner which led up the street where there was a Post Office.  But instead of turning sharp to the left she stopped short for a minute.

There had suddenly come over her a feeling of horrible self-rebuke and even self-loathing.  It was dreadful that she, of all women, should have longed to hear that another murder had been committed last night!

Yet such was the shameful fact.  She had listened all through breakfast hoping to hear the dread news being shouted outside; yes, and more or less during the long discussion which had followed on the receipt of Margaret’s letter she had been hoping—­hoping against hope—­that those dreadful triumphant shouts of the newspaper-sellers still might come echoing down the Marylebone Road.  And yet hypocrite that she was, she had reproved Bunting when he had expressed, not disappointment exactly—­but, well, surprise, that nothing had happened last night.

Now her mind switched off to Joe Chandler.  Strange to think how afraid she had been of that young man!  She was no longer afraid of him, or hardly at all.  He was dotty—­that’s what was the matter with him, dotty with love for rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed little Daisy.  Anything might now go on, right under Joe Chandler’s very nose—­but, bless you, he’d never see it!  Last summer, when this affair, this nonsense of young Chandler and Daisy had begun, she had had very little patience with it all.  In fact, the memory of the way Joe had gone on then, the tiresome way he would be always dropping in, had been one reason (though not the most important reason of all) why she had felt so terribly put about at the idea of the girl coming again.  But now?  Well, now she had become quite tolerant, quite kindly—­at any rate as far as Joe Chandler was concerned.

She wondered why.