India, also appeared to be indisputable. If this were so, why then, the first part of the letter, at any rate, was the sane work of a perfectly sane man, and no more pointed at self-destruction than it did at self-shampooing. The clergyman and Mr. Willett, arriving at this most natural conclusion, sat and looked at each other for a few moments in painful silence. That unexplained and apparently unexplainable letter had been the one sole stumbling-block in Henry William Ollivera's otherwise perfect belief. But, to leave no loophole of uncertainty, Charles Willett was sought out. When found (with slippers down at heel, a short pipe in his mouth, and a pewter pint-pot at his elbow) he avowed, without the smallest reticence, that John Ollivera's appointment for half-past three on that long-past Monday afternoon in Helstonleigh, _had_ been with him; and that, in answer to Mr. Ollivera's interference in his affairs, he had desired him to mind his own business and to send word to his brother to do the same. This left no doubt whatever on the clergyman's mind that the commenced letter had been as sensible and ordinary a letter as any man could sit down to pen, and that the blotted words were appended to it by a different hand--that of the murderer. In the full flush of his newly-acquired information, he went straight to the house of Mr. Greatorex, to pour the story into his uncle's ear. It happened to be the very day alluded to in the last chapter--in the evening of which you had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Roland Yorke industriously putting his shoulder to the wheel, after the ordinary hours of office work were over. Mr. Greatorex had been slightly discomposed that day in regard to business matters. It seemed to him that something or other was perpetually arising to cause annoyance to the firm. Their connection was on the increase, requiring the unwearied, active energies of its three heads more fully than it had ever done; whereas one of those heads was less efficient in management than he used to be--the second of them, Bede Greatorex. Mr. Greatorex, a remarkably capable man, always had more hard, sterling, untiring work in him than Bede, and he had it still. With his mother's warm Spanish blood, Bede had inherited the smallest modicum of temperamental indolence. As he had inherited (so ran the suspicion), the disease which had proved fatal to her.