Which was decidedly a rather mysterious addition to the answer. Mr. Butterby naturally inquired what it might mean, and had his ears gratified with the story of Godfrey Pitman's later departure, and of Mrs. Jones's angry disbelief in it. Never had those ears listened more keenly.
"Are you sure it was the man?" he asked cautiously.
"If it wasn't him it was his ghost," said Mr. Cause. "I was standing here on the Monday night, just a step or two for'arder on the pavement, little thinking that a poor gentleman was shooting himself within a few yards of me, and saw a man come out of Jones's side door. When he was close up, I knew him in a moment for the same traveller, with the same blue bag in his hand, that I saw go in with Miss Rye on the Sunday week previous. He came out of the house cautiously, his head pushed forward first, looking up the street and down the street, and then turned out sharp, whisked past me as hard as he could walk, and went down Bear Entry. It seemed to me that he didn't care to be seen."
But that detectives' hearts are too hard for emotion, this one's might have beaten a little faster as he listened. It was so exactly what he had been fancifully tracing to himself as the imaginary course of a guilty man. Stealing out of the house down Bear Entry, and so up to the railway station!
"What time was it?"
"What time is it now?" returned Mr. Cause: and the other took out his watch.
"Five-and-thirty minutes past seven."
"Then it was as nigh the same time on Monday night, as nigh as nigh can be. I shut up my shop at the usual hour, and I'd stood here afterwards just about as long as I've stood here now. I like to take a breath of fresh air, Mr. Butterby, when the labours of the day are over."
"Fresh air's good for all of us--that can get it," said Mr. Butterby, with a sniff at the air around him. "What sort of a looking man was this Godfrey Pitman?"
"A well-grown, straight man; got a lot of black hair about his face; whiskers, and beard, and moustachios."