"Only this--that I don't see where the paper could have come from but out of your own pocketbook," replied Mrs. Gass frankly. "I have no other reason to suspect you; I'd as soon suspect myself. It is just a mystery, and nothing else." "Whatever the mystery may be, it is not connected with my pocketbook, Mrs. Gass," he emphatically said. "Did you mention this to Richard North?" "No. Nor to anybody else. It was not a pleasant thing to speak of, you see." "Not a pleasant thing for me, certainly, to be suspected of having dropped that paper. The culprit, an innocent one, no doubt, must have been Molly Green." "I never was so brought up in all my life," cried the puzzled woman. "As to Molly Green--it must be just a fancy of yours, doctor, for it never can be fact." Oliver Rane drew his chair a little nearer to Mrs. Gass, and whispered a word of the doubt touching Mrs. North. He only spoke of it _as_ a doubt; a hint at most; but Mrs. Gass was not slow to take it. "Heaven help the woman!--if it's her work." "But this must not be breathed aloud," he said, taking alarm. "It may be a false suspicion." "Don't fear me: it's a thing too grave for me to mix myself up in," was the reply: and to give Mrs. Gass her due, she did look scared in no slight degree. "Dr. Rane, I am sorry for saying what I did to you. It was the impossibility, as I took it, of anything's having left it here but that flutter of papers from your pocketbook. Whoever would have given a thought to Molly Green?" Dr. Rane made no answer. "She put her basket down by the door there, and came up the room to look at my geraniums; I held the candle for her. I remember she caught her crinoline on the corner of the iron fender, and it gave her a twist round. The idiots that girls make of themselves with them big crinolines! Perhaps it dropped from her then." "Well, let us bury it in silence, Mrs. Gass; it is only a doubt at best," said the prudent but less eloquent physician. "You will allow me to take this," he added alluding to the paper. "I should like to examine it at leisure." "Take it, and welcome," she answered; "I'm glad to be rid of it. As to burying it in silence, we had better, I expect, both do that." "Even to Richard North," he enjoined rather anxiously. "Even to Richard North. I have kept secrets in my day, doctor, and can keep 'em again." Dr. Rane put the paper in his pocketbook, deposited that in the breast-pocket of his coat, and took his departure. But now, being a shrewd man, a suspicion that he would not have given utterance to for the whole world, lay on Dr. Rane--that it was more in accordance with probability that the paper had dropped out of his pocketbook than from Molly Green's petticoats, seeing they were _not_ finished off with fish-hooks. A heavy weight lying there on his breast! And he went along with a loitering step, asking himself how the paper could have originally come there. CHAPTER IV. ALONE WITH THE TRUTH.