"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." "Young?" "Thirty. Perhaps not so much. In reading the account in the _Herald_ this evening, I saw Jones's folks gave evidence that he had left at half-past four to catch the Birmingham train. I told Jones it was a mistake, and he told his wife; and didn't she fly out! As if she need have put herself in a tantrum over that! 'twas a matter of no consequence." In common with the rest of the town, not a gleam of suspicion that the death was otherwise than the verdict pronounced it to be, had been admitted by Mr. Cause. He went on enlarging on the grievance of Mrs. Jones's attack upon him. "She'd not hear a word: Jones fetched me in there. She told me to my face that, between spectacles and the deceitful rays of street lamps, one, come to my age, was unable to distinguish black from white, round from square. She said I must have mistaken the gentleman, Mr. Greatorex, for Godfrey Pitman or else Jones's nephew, both of them having gone out about the same time. I couldn't get in a word edgeways, I assure you Mr. Butterby, and Dicky Jones can bear me out that I couldn't. Let it go, 'tis of no moment; I don't care to quarrel with my neighbours' wives."