How quietly, how uneventfully, how pleasantly, sped the next few
days. Already life was settling down into a groove. Waiting on
Mr. Sleuth was just what Mrs. Bunting could manage to do easily,
and without tiring herself.

It had at once become clear that the lodger preferred to be waited
on only by one person, and that person his landlady. He gave her
very little trouble. Indeed, it did her good having to wait on the
lodger; it even did her good that he was not like other gentlemen;
for the fact occupied her mind, and in a way it amused her. The
more so that whatever his oddities Mr. Sleuth had none of those
tiresome, disagreeable ways with which landladies are only too
familiar, and which seem peculiar only to those human beings who
also happen to be lodgers. To take but one point: Mr. Sleuth did
not ask to be called unduly early. Bunting and his Ellen had fallen
into the way of lying rather late in the morning, and it was a great
comfort not to have to turn out to make the lodger a cup of tea at
seven, or even half-past seven. Mr. Sleuth seldom required anything
before eleven.

But odd he certainly was.

The second evening he had been with them Mr. Sleuth had brought in
a book of which the queer name was Cruden's Concordance. That and
the Bible--Mrs. Bunting had soon discovered that there was a
relation between the two books--seemed to be the lodger's only
reading. He spent hours each day, generally after he had eaten
the breakfast which also served for luncheon, poring over the Old
Testament and over that strange kind of index to the Book.