"There you are right, sir," readily avowed the officer. "I should uncommonly like to come across that Godfrey Pitman on my own score: setting aside anything he might have had to do with the late Mr. Ollivera."
The clergyman quickly took up the words. "Do you think he had anything to do with his death?"
"I don't go as far as that. It might have been. Anyway, as circumstances stand at present, he seems the most likely to have had, of all those who were known to have been in the house that evening."
Happening to raise his eyes, Mr. Brown caught those of Mr. Bede Greatorex. They were fixed on the speaker with a kind of eager, earnest light. To many a man it might have told the tale--that he, Bede Greatorex, had also doubts of Pitman. But then, Bede Greatorex had expressed his belief in the suicide: expressed it still. One thing was certain, had Bede chosen to confess it--that Godfrey Pitman was in his mind far oftener than the world knew.
"How is it that you have never found him?" continued Mr. Ollivera, to Butterby.
"I don't know. We are not usually at fault for a tithe of the time. But the man, you see, was under false colours; his face and his name were alike changed."
"You think so?"
"Think so!" repeated Mr. Butterby with a second dose of compassion for the parson's intellect. "That mass of hair on his face was hardly likely to be real. As to the name, Pitman, it was about as much his as it was mine. However, we have not found him, and there's no more to be made of it than that. Mr. Bede Greatorex asked me about the man the other day, whether I didn't think he might have gone at once out of the country. It happens to be what I've thought all along."
"I do not see what he could have against my brother, that he should injure him," spoke the clergyman, gazing on vacancy, the dreamy look, so often seen in them, taking possession of his eyes. "So far as can be known, they were strangers."
"Now, sir, don't you run your head again a stone wall. Nobody says he did injure him; only that it's within the range of possibility he could have done it. As to being strangers, he might have turned out to be one of Counsellor Ollivera's dearest friends, once his disguises were took off."