"Look here, girl. My belief is that you've just set a brand on fire! one that won't be put out until it's burnt out. My firm belief also is, _that you be altogether mistaken_. I have thought the matter over with myself hour after hour; and, except at the first moment when you whispered it to me in the churchyard, and I own I was startled, I have never been able to bring my common sense to believe in it. Oliver Rane loved his wife too well to hurt a hair of her head." "There was that anonymous letter," cried Jelly. "Whatever hand he might have had in that anonymous letter--and nobody knows the truth of it whether he had or whether he hadn't--I don't believe he was the man to hurt a hair of his wife's head," repeated Mrs. Gass. "And for you to be spreading it about that he murdered her!" "The circumstances all point to it," said Jelly. "They don't." "Why, Mrs. Gass, they do." "Let's go over 'em, and see," said Mrs. Gass, who had a plain way of convincing people. "Let's begin at the beginning. Hear me out, Jelly." She went over the past minutely. Jelly listened, growing more uncomfortable every moment. There was absolutely not one fact inconsistent with a natural death. It is true the demise had been speedy, but the cause assigned, exhaustion, might have been the real one; and the hasty fastening down of the coffin was no doubt a simple measure of precaution, taken out of regard for the living. No; as Mrs. Gass put it in her sensible way, there was positively not a single fact that could be urged for supposing that Mrs. Rane came to an untimely end. Jelly twirled her gloves, and twisted her hands, and grew hot and uncomfortable. "There was what I saw--the ghost," she said. But Mrs. Gass ridiculed the ghost--that is, the idea of it--beyond everything earthly. Jelly, however, would not give way there; and they had some sparring. "Ghost, indeed! and you come to this age! It was the beer, girl; the beer." "I hadn't had a drop of beer," protested Jelly, almost crying. "How was I to get beer at Ketler's? They've none for themselves. I had had nothing inside my lips but tea." "Well; beer or no beer, ghost or no ghost, it strikes me, Jelly, that you have done a pretty thing. This story is as sure to get wind now as them geraniums of mine will have air when I open the window tomorrow morning. You'll be called upon to substantiate your story; and when you can't--and I'm sure you know that you can't--the law may have you up to answer for it. I once knew a man that rose a bad charge against another; he was tried for it, and got seven years' transportation. You may come to the same." A very agreeable prospect! If Jelly's bonnet had not been on, her hair might have risen up on end with horror. There could be no doubt that it was she who had started the report; and in this moment of repentance she sat really wishing she had first cut her foolish tongue out.