"Mistress Hopkins, oh, Mistress Hopkins, consider!" begged Rose Standish, also rising in great distress. "Think what it is that you are saying, and to whom! You cannot knowingly accuse this dear girl of connivance in a theft! You cannot accuse Giles of committing it! Why, Captain Myles is fonder of the lad than of any other in our company! Giles is upright and true, he says, and fearless. Pray, pray, take back these fearful words! You do not mean them, and when you will long to disown them they will cling to you and not forsake you, as does our mad injustice, to our lasting sorrow. What can be more foreign to our calling than harsh judgments, and angry accusations?"
"I am not speaking rashly, Mistress Standish," insisted Dame Eliza.
"Not yet three hours gone Constantia saw lying in Damaris's hammock a valuable packet of papers, left me in trust by her father. I asked her to mend the hammock, which was in disorder, but she called her brother to do the simple task. No one else hath entered the cabin at my end of it since. The packet is gone. Would you have more proof? Could there be more proof, unless you saw the theft committed, which is manifestly impossible?"
"But why, good mistress, should the boy and girl steal these papers? What reason would there be for them to disturb their father's property?" asked Rose Standish.
"I have heard my uncle say, who is a barrister at home, that one must search for the motive of a crime if it is to be established." She glanced with a slight smile at Constance's stony face, who neither looked at her, nor smiled, but stood gazing in wide-eyed horror at her stepmother.
"Precisely!" triumphed Dame Eliza. "Two motives are clear, Mistress Standish, to those who are not too blinded by prejudice to see. Those Hopkins girl and boy hate me, fear and grudge my influence with their father. Would they not like to weaken it by the loss of papers entrusted to me, a loss that he would resent on his return? There is one motive. As to the other: you do not know, but I do, and so did they, that part of these papers related to an inheritance in England, from which they would want their half-brother and sister excluded. Needs it more?"
"Yes, yes, yes!" cried Rose Standish, as Constance groaned. "To any one knowing Giles and Constance this is no more than if you said Fee, fi, fo, fum! They plotting to weaken you with their father! They stealing to keep the children from a share in their inheritance, so generous as they are, so good to the little ones! Fie, Mistress Hopkins! It is a grievous sin, you who are so strict in small matters, a grievous sin thus to judge another, still more those to whom you owe the obligation of one who has taken their dead mother's place."
Constance began to tremble, and to struggle to speak. What she would have said, or what would have come of it, cannot be known, for at that moment the Billington boys, John and Francis, came hurtling down upon them, shouting:
"The shallop, the shallop is back! It is almost upon us on the other side. Come see, come see! Dad is back, and all the rest, unless the savages have killed some of them," Francis added the final words in solo.
The present trouble must be laid aside for the great business in hand of welcome.