"I didn't say you stole, Nathan, I only—"
"Who cares for your old nuts?" interrupted Nathan, "they're not worth the carrying off. Next thing you'll be saying I meddle with your cresses."
"No," said Bessie, a little sadly, "I shouldn't say that. There are only two or three baskets-full of nice ones left, and by next week Mr. Dart will have taken them all to market. I don't care about my nuts, Nathan, it isn't that, but I should like to know who took them."
"Well, I didn't, anyhow," said Nathan, "and since you are so cross about it, I shan't stay to talk to you."
He clambered down from the fence and walked away whistling, with his hands in his pockets.
Some way, Bessie felt a presentiment that Nathan knew more than he said about the nuts. She concluded to go in and ask her mother if it could possibly be that he had taken the missing money.
Her mother listened in silence to all she had to utter on the subject. Bessie told her that Nathan was aware, and had been aware from the beginning, where the Madeira nut was kept. She said he was present when she first put it in the drawer, which was indeed true, as the reader knows, and that often since, they had looked at it together.
"My dear," said her mother, when Bessie concluded, "I do not see that you have any thing more than conjecture on which to found your suspicions. It is very wrong to act on conjecture only."
"But everybody thinks Nat is a bad boy," said Bessie eagerly; "the neighbors say he will do almost any thing. Only last Sunday he pinned the minister's coat tails to the shade of the church window, as he stood talking to Deacon Danbury, after meeting was over. When the minister went to walk off, down came the shade on his head and smashed his new hat. I think that a boy who will do that would take things that do not belong to him."
"Perhaps he might," said her mother quietly.