At the end of ten minutes or so she heard him go down the passage again.  Very softly he closed the front door.  By then she had divined why the lodger had behaved in this funny fashion.  He wanted to get the strong, acrid smell of burning—­was it of burning wool? —­out of the house.

But Mrs. Bunting, lying there in the darkness, listening to the lodger creeping upstairs, felt as if she herself would never get rid of the horrible odour.

Mrs. Bunting felt herself to be all smell.

At last the unhappy woman fell into a deep, troubled sleep; and then she dreamed a most terrible and unnatural dream.  Hoarse voices seemed to be shouting in her ear:  “The Avenger close here!  The Avenger close here!” “’Orrible murder off the Edgware Road!” “The Avenger at his work again!”

And even in her dream Mrs. Bunting felt angered—­angered and impatient.  She knew so well why she was being disturbed by this horrid nightmare!  It was because of Bunting—­Bunting, who could think and talk of nothing else than those frightful murders, in which only morbid and vulgar-minded people took any interest.

Why, even now, in her dream, she could hear her husband speaking to her about it: 

“Ellen”—­so she heard Bunting murmur in her ear—­“Ellen, my dear, I’m just going to get up to get a paper.  It’s after seven o’clock.”

The shouting—­nay, worse, the sound of tramping, hurrying feet smote on her shrinking ears.  Pushing back her hair off her forehead with both hands, she sat up and listened.

It had been no nightmare, then, but something infinitely worse—­ reality.

Why couldn’t Bunting have lain quiet abed for awhile longer, and let his poor wife go on dreaming?  The most awful dream would have been easier to bear than this awakening.

She heard her husband go to the front door, and, as he bought the paper, exchange a few excited words with the newspaper-seller.  Then he came back.  There was a pause, and she heard him lighting the gas-ring in the sitting-room.

Bunting always made his wife a cup of tea in the morning.  He had promised to do this when they first married, and he had never yet broken his word.  It was a very little thing and a very usual thing, no doubt, for a kind husband to do, but this morning the knowledge that he was doing it brought tears to Mrs. Bunting’s pale blue eyes.  This morning he seemed to be rather longer than usual over the job.

When, at last, he came in with the little tray, Bunting found his wife lying with her face to the wall.

“Here’s your tea, Ellen,” he said, and there was a thrill of eager, nay happy, excitement in his voice.

She turned herself round and sat up.  “Well?” she asked.  “Well?  Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I thought you was asleep,” he stammered out.  “I thought, Ellen, you never heard nothing.”

“How could I have slept through all that din?  Of course I heard.  Why don’t you tell me?”