Crafty man! Mrs. Jones had assuredly dealt him a box on the ear could she have divined that he was deceiving her. He had been watching her house for some minutes past, knowing just as well as she did that it was hers. Mrs. Jones invited him indoors, and he went under protest, not wishing, he said, to intrude: but the going indoors was what he intended doing all along.
They sat gossiping of old times and new. Mr. Butterby took a friendly glass of beer and a biscuit; Mrs. Jones, knitting always, took none. Without seeming to be at all anxious for the information, he had speedily gathered in every particular about Roland Yorke that there was to gather. Not too charitably disposed to the world in general, in speech at any rate, Mrs. Jones yet spoke well of Roland.
"He is no more like the proud, selfish aristocrat he used to be than chalk's like cheese," she said. "In his younger days Roland Yorke thought the world was made for him and his pleasure, no matter who else suffered: he doesn't think it now."
"Sowed his wild oats, has he?" remarked Mr. Butterby.
"For the matter of wild oats, I never knew he had any particular ones to sow," retorted Mrs. Jones. "Whether or not, he has got none left, that I can see."
"Wouldn't help himself to another twenty-pound note," said Mr. Butterby carelessly, stretching out his hand to take a second biscuit.
"No, that he would not," emphatically pronounced Mrs. Jones. "And I know this--that there never was an act repented of as he repents of that. His thoughts are but skin-deep; he's not crafty enough to hide them, and those that run may read. If cutting off his right hand would undo that past act, he'd cut it off and be glad, Mr. Butterby."
"Shouldn't wonder," assented the officer. "Many folks is in the like case. Have you ever come across that Godfrey Pitman?"
"Not I. Have you?"
The officer shook his head. Godfrey Pitman had hitherto remained a dead failure.