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When the moment for decision came, Barbara snatched up the folded white table-cloth, threw it with knives, forks, and plates upon a tray, and ascended to the lodger's sitting-room. Her cheeks were hot; her eyes flashed. She had donned the most elegant attire in her possession, had made her hair magnificent. Her knock at the door was meant to be a declaration of independence; it sounded peremptory.
In the transition through autumn from summer to winter a transition which, according to the experience of tens of thousands of London lodgers, is capable of turning comparative comfort into absolute discomfort Mrs. Haim had behaved with benevolence and ingenuity. For example, the bedroom fire, laid overnight, was now burning up well from the mere touch of the lodger's own match.
When he was in the third stage of drunkenness he would never teach Cake, but would only abuse his enemies, and this Noyes invariably came in for a fearful shower of epithets. It was he as Cake heard it, sitting huddled on the old dry-goods box, the candle casting strange shadows into her gaunt, unchildlike face, who was the cause of the lodger's downfall.
She made no answer to her lodger's remark, for the good reason that she did not know what to say. Her silence seemed to distress Mr. Sleuth. After what seemed a long pause, he spoke again. "I prefer bare walls, Mrs. Bunting," he spoke with some agitation. "As a matter of fact, I have been used to seeing bare walls about me for a long time."
Kepp and her daughter were wont to spend their evenings in the lodger's apartment now; for the invalid complained bitterly of "the horrors" when they left him. "I have taken you for all sorts of people, Mary Anne," pursued the Captain dreamily. "Sometimes I have fancied you were the Countess of Jersey, and I could see her smile as she looked at me when I was first presented to her.
She watched the boy and his beast go down the road, and went back to the task of preparing her lodger's breakfast. To Monte Carlo the cabbage seller did not go. Instead, he turned back the way he had come, and a hundred yards from the gate of Villa Casa, Mordon, the chauffeur, appeared, and took the rope from his hand. "Did you find what you wanted, mademoiselle?" he asked. Jean nodded.
It was the fat man in the checked suit she saw leaning helplessly against the closed door. His jaw sagged, his eyes were frightfully popped, his face wore the same strained, queer look she had come to see so often on the lodger's, and he made weak little flapping gestures with his hands. Cake looked then at Arthur Noyes.
And yet, as she looked into her lodger's face, she was surprised at its expression. "Why, you never have heard of it, have you?" she demanded. Galusha stroked his chin. "That day in the cemetery," he murmured. "That day when I was ah behind the tomb and heard Captain Hallett and Mr. Pulcifer speaking. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that they mentioned the name of ah ah "
The lodger's name was Cobbington; and Jackman thought he was poor." "He must have been, to take a room at Captain Boomsby's house." "I asked Jackman what things besides the trunks he had carried to the St. Johns Hotel. He replied that Cobbington had a pet rattlesnake and a box of alligators." "All this goes to confirm Captain Boomsby's explanation," I added. "I think it has a tendency that way.
"I forgot to say that no questions were to be asked," broke in the other. "But I insist upon having everything cleared up. Here am I with a box of jewels stolen from a lodger's room, God knows how, and in danger of being slapped into jail if they catch me with the " "All you have to do is to keep quiet and look innocent. Stay out of the hall to-night. Don't go near the door of No. 30.
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