"Jelf has it in hand here, and I've not yet got to see him. Not of much use my seeing him before I've heard what Bede Greatorex has to say. One thing they've not been sharp enough to discover yet--_where Godfrey Pitman is to be found_. Foster in Birmingham holds his tongue, Johnson shows Jelf the door when he goes to ask about Winter: and there they are, Jelf and the Parson, or Jelf and Mr. Greatorex--whichever of them two it is that's stirring--mooning up and down England after Pitman, little thinking he's close at home, right under their very noses. I and Bede Greatorex hold _that_ secret tight; but I don't think I shall feel inclined to hold it long. 'Where _is_ Pitman?' says the sergeant to me yesterday, at headquarters. 'Ah!' says I, 'that's just the problem we are some of us trying to work out.'" Mr. Butterby stopped, cracked the coal fiercely, which sent up a blaze of sparks, and waited. Resuming after a while. "And it _is_ a problem; one _I_ can't make come square just yet. There's Brown--as good call him by one alias as another--keeping as quiet as a mouse, knowing that he is being looked after for the murder of Counsellor Ollivera. What's his motive in keeping dark? The debts he left behind him in Birmingham are paid; Johnson and Teague acknowledge his innocence in that past transaction of young Master Samuel's; they are, so to say, his friends, and the man knows all this. Why, then, don't he come forward and reap the benefit of the acquittal, and put himself clear before the world, and say--Neither am I guilty of the other thing--the counsellor's death? Of course, when Jeff and Jeff's masters know he is hiding himself somewhere, and does _not_ come forward, they assume that he dare not, that he was the man who did it. I'd not swear but he was, either. Looking at it in a broad point of view, one can't help seeing that he must have some urgent motive for his silence--and what that motive is, one may give a shrewd guess at: that he is screening himself or somebody else. There's only one other in the world that he would screen, I expect, and that's Alletha Rye." A long pause. A pause of silence. Mr. Butterby's face, with all his professional craft, had as puzzled a look on it as any ordinary mortal's might wear. "I suspected Alletha Rye more than anybody at the time. Don't suspect her now. Don't _think_ it was her; wouldn't swear it wasn't, though. And, in spite of your injunction to be still, Mr. Bede Greatorex, I'll go into the thing a bit for my own satisfaction."