to be indefensible from every point of view; he began to hope, that
is, in the depths of his heart, that the lodger would again go out
one evening on his horrible business and be caught--red-handed.

But far from going out on any business, horrible or other, Mr.
Sleuth now never went out at all. He kept upstairs, and often spent
quite a considerable part of his day in bed. He still felt, so he
assured Mrs. Bunting, very far from well. He had never thrown off
the chill he had caught on that bitter 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.