Never, never had she felt so hopeless, so—­so broken as now.  Where was the good of having been an upright, conscientious, self-respecting woman all her life long, if it only led to this utter, degrading poverty and wretchedness?  She and Bunting were just past the age which gentlefolk think proper in a married couple seeking to enter service together, unless, that is, the wife happens to be a professed cook.  A cook and a butler can always get a nice situation.  But Mrs. Bunting was no cook.  She could do all right the simple things any lodger she might get would require, but that was all.

Lodgers?  How foolish she had been to think of taking lodgers!  For it had been her doing.  Bunting had been like butter in her hands.

Yet they had begun well, with a lodging-house in a seaside place.  There they had prospered, not as they had hoped to do, but still pretty well; and then had come an epidemic of scarlet fever, and that had meant ruin for them, and for dozens, nay, hundreds, of other luckless people.  Then had followed a business experiment which had proved even more disastrous, and which had left them in debt—­in debt to an extent they could never hope to repay, to a good-natured former employer.

After that, instead of going back to service, as they might have done, perhaps, either together or separately, they had made up their minds to make one last effort, and they had taken over, with the trifle of money that remained to them, the lease of this house in the Marylebone Road.

In former days, when they had each been leading the sheltered, impersonal, and, above all, financially easy existence which is the compensation life offers to those men and women who deliberately take upon themselves the yoke of domestic service, they had both lived in houses overlooking Regent’s Park.  It had seemed a wise plan to settle in the same neighbourhood, the more so that Bunting, who had a good appearance, had retained the kind of connection which enables a man to get a job now and again as waiter at private parties.

But life moves quickly, jaggedly, for people like the Buntings.  Two of his former masters had moved to another part of London, and a caterer in Baker Street whom he had known went bankrupt.

And now?  Well, just now Bunting could not have taken a job had one been offered him, for he had pawned his dress clothes.  He had not asked his wife’s permission to do this, as so good a husband ought to have done.  He had just gone out and done it.  And she had not had the heart to say anything; nay, it was with part of the money that he had handed her silently the evening he did it that she had bought that last packet of tobacco.

And then, as Mrs. Bunting sat there thinking these painful thoughts, there suddenly came to the front door the sound of a loud, tremulous, uncertain double knock.

CHAPTER II

Mr. Bunting jumped nervously to her feet.  She stood for a moment listening in the darkness, a darkness made the blacker by the line of light under the door behind which sat Bunting reading his paper.