But there was something else in her head when she reached the house, where she met some very suspicious looks not only from Isabella, but also from Mrs Warrender, for we may as well confess that the daughter had told her mother that when the slip of the hand took place she felt as if the ring had been taken off by the hand of Mary. And then when Mary appeared with a lugubrious face, and reported that she had not found the ring in the shingle, the foresaid suspicion was so much confirmed, that very little more would be required to induce Mr Warrender to make some judicial investigation into the strange circumstance. An inauspicious afternoon and night for Mary, and not less the next day, when she was called into the dining-room, and so sharply interrogated by Mr Warrender, that she cried very bitterly, all the time asserting that she never felt her hand touch the ring, and that it had most certainly fallen into the water and been lost. But Mr Warrender was not a man who believed in tears, at least women’s; for he was ungallant enough to think, that as we cannot distinguish _ex parte rei_ between those of anger and those of sorrow, and as there is a kind called crocodile, as limpid as the others, and just as like a pretty dewdrop, so they never can or ought to be received as evidence either of guilt or innocence. And so it came about, that as the hours passed the conviction grew stronger and stronger in the minds of the family that the meek, and church-going, and psalm-singing Mary Mochrie was a thief. Of this latter fact, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, there could be no evidence beyond the finding of the missing article, either on Mary’s person or in some place under her power, for Isabella’s word could not go for much; and so it was resolved that Mary’s person and trunk should be searched. A very strong step in the case of a girl who had hitherto held a very good character, and probably altogether unjustifiable, where so powerful an abstractor of earthly things as Neptune was apparently as much in the scrape as Mary. Yet this strong thing was done _illotis manibus_, and, as might have been expected, with no effect beyond scandalising Mary, who went so far as to say that Heaven took care of its own, and that God would in His own time and way show her persecutors that she was as innocent as that babe unborn, who takes away and places, nobody knows where, so many of the wickednesses of the world. But then an assertion of innocence in the grand style of an appeal to the Deity sometimes piques a prosecutor, because it conveys an imputation that the accused one is better taken care of by Heaven than he is; and so it turned out here, for Mr Warrender felt as if he had been challenged to the ultimate trial by ordeal, and he straightway proceeded to take measures for having Mary apprehended upon the charge of having robbed his daughter of the much-prized ring.