“’She saith to him, stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.  But he knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.’”

There was a long pause.  Mrs. Bunting could hear the leaves of her Bible being turned over, eagerly, busily; and then again Mr. Sleuth broke out, this time in a softer voice: 

“’She hath cast down many wounded from her; yea, many strong men have been slain by her.’” And in a softer, lower, plaintive tone came the words:  “’I applied my heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom and the reason of things; and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness.’”

And as she stood there listening, a feeling of keen distress, of spiritual oppression, came over Mrs. Bunting.  For the first time in her life she visioned the infinite mystery, the sadness and strangeness, of human life.

Poor Mr. Sleuth—­poor unhappy, distraught Mr. Sleuth!  An overwhelming pity blotted out for a moment the fear, aye, and the loathing, she had been feeling for her lodger.

She knocked at the door, and then she took up her tray.

“Come in, Mrs. Bunting.”  Mr. Sleuth’s voice sounded feebler, more toneless than usual.

She turned the handle of the door and walked in.  The lodger was not sitting in his usual place; he had taken the little round table on which his candle generally rested when he read in bed, out of his bedroom, and placed it over by the drawing-room window.  On it were placed, open, the Bible and the Concordance.  But as his landlady came in, Mr. Sleuth hastily closed the Bible, and began staring dreamily out of the window, down at the sordid, hurrying crowd of men and women which now swept along the Marylebone Road.

“There seem a great many people out today,” he observed, without looking round.

“Yes, sir, there do.”

Mrs. Bunting began busying herself with laying the cloth and putting out the breakfast-lunch, and as she did so she was seized with a mortal, instinctive terror of the man sitting there.

At last Mr. Sleuth got up and turned round.  She forced herself to look at him.  How tired, how worn, he looked, and—­how strange!

Walking towards the table on which lay his meal, he rubbed his hands together with a nervous gesture—­it was a gesture he only made when something had pleased, nay, satisfied him.  Mrs. Bunting, looking at him, remembered that he had rubbed his hands together thus when he had first seen the room upstairs, and realised that it contained a large gas-stove and a convenient sink.

What Mr. Sleuth was doing now also reminded her in an odd way of a play she had once seen—­a play to which a young man had taken her when she was a girl, unnumbered years ago, and which had thrilled and fascinated her.  “Out, out, damned spot!” that was what the tall, fierce, beautiful lady who had played the part of a queen had said, twisting her hands together just as the lodger was doing now.