"What on earth's the matter?" demanded he.
"I'd like to speak to you in private for a minute, Miss Rye," said Mr. Butterby, in a low civil tone. "Tompkins, you wait there."
She went higher up the passage and looked round something liked a stag at bay. There was no unoccupied room to take him to. Mr. Brown's frugal dinner tray (luncheon, as he called it) was in his, awaiting his entrance. That the terrible man of law with his officer had come to arrest him Alletha never doubted. A hundred wild ideas of telegraphing him some impossible warning, not to enter, went teeming through her brain. Tompkins stood on the entrance mat; Roland Yorke, with his accustomed curiosity, put his back against his parlour door-post to watch proceedings.
"Miss Rye, I'd not have done this of my own accord, leastways not so soon, but it has been forced upon me," whispered Mr. Butterby. "I've got to ask you to go with me."
"To ask me?" she tremblingly said, while he was showing her a paper: probably the warrant.
"Are you so much surprised: after that there avowal you made to me last night? If I'd gone and told a police officer that I had killed somebody, it would not astonish me to be took."
Her face fell. The pallor of her cheeks was coloured by a faint crimson; her eyes flashed with a condemning light.
"I told you in confidence, as one friend might speak to another, in defence of him who was not there to defend himself," she panted. "How could I suppose you would hasten treacherously to use it against me?"
"Ah," said Mr. Butterby, "in things of that sort us law defenders is just the wrong sort to make confidants of. But now, look here, Miss Rye, I didn't go and abuse that confidence, and though it is me that has put the wheels of the law in motion, it is done in obedience to orders, which I had no power to stop. I'm sorry to have to do it: and I've come down with the warrant myself out of respect to you, that things might be accomplished as genteel as might be."
"Now then, Alletha! Do you know that your dinner's getting cold? What on earth are you stopping there for? Who is it?"