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.