itter night he and his landlord
had met on their several ways home.

Joe Chandler, too, had become a terrible complication to Daisy's
father. The detective spent every waking hour that he was not on
duty with the Buntings; and Bunting, who at one time had liked him
so well and so cordially, now became mortally afraid of him.

But though the young man talked of little else than The Avenger,
and though on one evening he described at immense length the
eccentric-looking gent who had given the barmaid a sovereign,
picturing Mr. Sleuth with such awful accuracy that both Bunting and
Mrs. Bunting secretly and separately turned sick when they listened
to him, he never showed the slightest interest in their lodger.

At last there came a morning when Bunting and Chandler held a strange
conversation about The Avenger. The young fellow had come in earlier
than usual, and just as he arrived Mrs. Bunting and Daisy were
starting out to do some shopping. The girl would fain have stopped
behind, but her stepmother had given her a very peculiar, disagreeable
look, daring her, so to speak, to be so forward, and Daisy had gone
on with a flushed, angry look on her pretty face.

And then, as young Chandler stepped through into the sitting-room,
it suddenly struck Bunting that the young man looked unlike himself
--indeed, to the ex-butler's apprehension there was something almost
threatening in Chandler's attitude.

"I want a word with you, Mr. Bunting," he began abruptly, falteringly.
"And I'm glad to have the chance now that Mrs. Bunting and Miss Daisy
are out."

Bunting braced himself to hear the awful words--the accusation of
having sheltered a murderer, the monster whom all the world was
seeking, under his roof. And then he remembered a phrase, a
horrible legal phrase--"Accessory after the fact." Yes, he had
been that, there wasn't any doubt about it!

"Yes?" he said. "What is it, Joe?" and then the unfortunate man
sat down in his chair. "Yes?" he said again uncertainly; for young
Chandler had now advanced to the table, he was looking at Bunting
fixedly--the other thought threateningly. "Well, out with it,
Joe! Don't keep me in suspense."

And then a slight smile broke over the young man's face. "I don't
think what I've got to say can take you by surprise, Mr. Bunting."

And Bunting wagged his head in a way that might mean anything--yes
or no, as the case might be.

The two men looked at one another for what seemed a very, v