d pretty
young women, too,--quite as pretty as Daisy, and ten times more
artful--and yet there! He passed them all by, had done so ever
since last summer, though you might be sure that they, artful minxes,
by no manner of means passed him by,--without giving them a thought!
As Daisy wasn't here, he would probably keep away to-day. There
was comfort in that thought, too.

And then Mrs. Bunting sat up, and memory returned in a dreadful
turgid flood. If Joe did come in, she must nerve herself to hear
all that--that talk there'd be about The Avenger between him and
Bunting.

Slowly she dragged herself out of bed, feeling exactly as if she
had just recovered from an illness which had left her very weak,
very, very tired in body and soul.

She stood for a moment listening--listening, and shivering, for
it was very cold. Considering how early it still was, there
seemed a lot of coming and going in the Marylebone Road. She could
hear the unaccustomed sounds through her closed door and the tightly
fastened windows of the sitting-room. There must be a regular
crowd of men and women, on foot and in cabs, hurrying to the scene
of The Avenger's last extraordinary crime.

She heard the sudden thud made by their usual morning paper falling
from the letter-box on to the floor of the hall, and a moment later
came the sound of Bunting quickly, quietly going out and getting it.
She visualised him coming back, and sitting down with a sigh of
satisfaction by the newly-lit fire.

Languidly she began dressing herself to the accompaniment of distant
tramping and of noise of passing traffic, which increased in volume
and in sound as the moments slipped by.

******

When Mrs. Bunting went down into her kitchen everything looked just
as she had left it, and there was no trace of the acrid smell she
had expected to find there. Instead, the cavernous, whitewashed
room was full of fog, but she noticed that, though the shutters were
bolted and barred as she had left them, the windows behind them had
been widely opened to the air. She had left them shut.

Making a "spill" out of a twist of newspaper--she had been taught
the art as a girl by one of her old mistresses--she stooped and
flung open the oven-door of her gas-stove. Yes, it was as she had
expected, a fierce heat had been generated there since she had last
used the oven, and through to the stone floor below had fallen a
mass of black, gluey soot.

Mrs. Bunting took the ham and eg