"And now it only remains for me to declare that I have set down this singular dream truthfully, word for word; and I shall seal it up and keep it. It may be of use if any trouble falls upon Jack, as the dream seems to foretell--and of some trouble in store for him he has already felt the shadow. So strangely vivid a dream, and the intense pain it brought and leaves with me, can hardly have visited me for nothing.--ALICE TANERTON." That was all the paper said. The Squire, poring through his good old spectacles over it, shook his head as Alice pointed out the description of the guilty man, how exactly it tallied with the appearance of Sir Dace Fontaine; but he only repeated Paul the lawyer's words, "One cannot act upon a dream." "It was Sir Dace; it was Sir Dace," reiterated Alice, clasping her hands piteously. "I am as sure of it as that I hope to go to heaven." And I drove her home in the belief. There ensued a commotion. Not a commotion to be told to the parish, but a private one amidst ourselves. I never saw a woman in such a fever of excitement as Alice Tanerton was in from that day, or any one take up a matter so warmly. Captain Tanerton did not adopt her views. He shook his head, and said Sir Dace it _could not_ have been. Sir Dace was at his house in the Marylebone Road at the very hour the calamity happened off Tower Hill. I followed suit, hearing out Jack's word. Was I not at the Marylebone Road that evening myself, playing chess with Coralie?--and was not Sir Dace shut up in his library all the time, and never came out of it? Alice listened, and looked puzzled to death. But she held to her own opinion. And when a fit of desperate obstinacy takes possession of a woman without rhyme or reason, you cannot shake it. As good try to argue with the whistling wind. She did not pretend to see how it could have been, she said, but Sir Dace was guilty. And she haunted Paul and Chandler's office at Islip, praying them to take the matter up. At length, to soothe her, and perhaps to prevent her carrying it elsewhere, they promised they would. And of course they had to make some show of doing it. One evening Tom Chandler came to Crabb Cot and asked to see me alone. "I want you to tell me all the particulars you remember of that fatal night," he began, when I went to him in the Squire's little room. "I have taken down Captain Tanerton's testimony, and I must have yours, Johnny." "But, are you going to stir in it?" "We must do something, I suppose. Paul thinks so. I am going to London to-morrow on other matters, and shall use the opportunity to make an inquiry or two. It is rather a strange piece of business altogether," added Mr. Chandler, as he took his place at the table and drew the inkstand towards him. "John Tanerton is innocent. I feel sure of that." "How strongly Mrs. Tanerton has taken it up!"