A lightning glance from Bede Greatorex's fine dark Spanish eyes flashed out on the detective. It said as plainly as glance could speak, "How dare you presume to betray my confidence?"
That gentleman sat unmoved, and nodded a good morning with his customary equanimity.
"Mr. Greatorex--doing me the honour to call upon me to report progress--observed that he fully thought it was one of the clerks in your room we must look to, sir," spoke Butterby in a slow calm tone. "I told him your opinion was the same; and you had charged me to look well after them, especially Mr. Hurst. That was all."
Bede Greatorex bit his lip in anger. But the communication might have been worse.
"What is there against Hurst?" impatiently asked Mr. Greatorex.
"Nothing at all," said Bede quietly. "If I said to Mr. Butterby that one of my clerks might have taken the cheque, it was only because access to my room was more obtainable by them than by anybody else I can think of. And of the four, Hurst spends the most money."
"Hurst has the most money to spend," observed Mr. Greatorex.
"Of course he has. I make no doubt Hurst is as innocent as I."
This was very different from suspecting Hurst, from desiring that he should be specially looked after, and perhaps Mr. Greatorex felt the two accounts the least in the world contradictory. The keen-sighted observer sitting by, apparently sharpening the point of his broken lead-pencil, noticed that the eyes of Bede Greatorex never once went openly into the face of his father.
"If it was my case," thought the officer, "I should tell him the truth out and out. No good going about the bush this way, saying he suspects one and suspects another, when he does not suspect 'em: far better that old Greatorex should hear the whole and see for himself that it can't be gone into. He don't care to worrit the old gentleman: that's what it is."