The interrupting questioner was the Reverend Henry William Ollivera. As he entered, the first man his eyes fell on was Butterby. It was a mutual recognition: and they had not met since that evening in Butterby's rooms on the occasion of the clergyman's visit to Helstonleigh. Before a minute had well elapsed, as it seemed to the two spectators, they were deep in that calamity of the past, recalling some of its details, lamenting the non-success that had attended the endeavour to trace it out. It did not much interest Roland, and his mind also was filled to the brim with matter more agreeable. Apparently it did not interest Brown the manager, for he kept his head bent on his work. In the midst of it Bede Greatorex came in. "I tell you, Mr. Officer, my faith has never wavered, or my opinion changed," the clergyman was saying with emotion, scarcely interrupting himself to nod a salutation to Bede. "My brother did not commit suicide. He was barbarously murdered; as every instinct warned me at the time, and warns me still. The waiting seems long; the time rolls by, day after day, year after year: weariness has to be subdued, patience cherished; but, that the hour of elucidation will come, is as sure as that you and I stand here, facing each other." "Mr. Greatorex told me that the Reverend Ollivera stood to his opinion as strongly as he ever did," was the answering remark of the officer; and it might be that there was a shade of compassion in his tone--compassion for the mistaken folly of the man before him. "It has occurred to me at times, that if I were a member of the detective police, endowed with all the acuteness for the discovery of crime that their occupation and (we may suppose) natural aptitude for it must give, I should have brought the matter to light long ago. Do not think I reflect on your individual skill or care, sir; I speak generally." "Ah!" said Mr. Butterby with complacent jocularity, "we all are apt to picture to ourselves how much we'd do in other folks's skins." "It is strange that you have never been able to find traces of the man whose name was afterwards mixed up in the affair, Godfrey Pitman." "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."