But in a moment Jelly's senses had come back to her. She set herself coolly to remedy the mischief.
"To think that my mind should have run off from the pudding-receipt to that letter of poor Mr. Edmund's! It's your fault, Molly Green, bothering my wits out of me! Where did you pick up the paper? There. Answer that; and let's end it."
Molly thought it might be as well to end it; she was growing tired of the play: besides, here were Turtle's men coming into the room to finish the carpet.
"I never had the receipt at all, Jelly, and it's not possible it could have dropped from me: that's the blessed truth. After talking to me, just as you've done, and turning me inside out, as one may say, Mrs. Gass as good as confessed that it might have fell out of her own bundle of receipts that she keeps in the sideboard drawer."
Slowly, Jelly arrived at a conviction that Molly Green, in regard to knowing nothing about the paper, must be telling the truth. It did not tend to lessen her anger.
"Then why on earth have you been keeping up this farce with me? I'll teach you manners with your betters, girl."
"Well, why did you set upon me?" was the good-humoured answer. "There's no such great treason in dropping a plum-pudding-receipt, even if I had done it--which I didn't. I don't like to be brow-beat for nothing: and it's not your place to do it, Jelly."
Jelly said no more. Little did she suspect that Mr. Richard North, leaning against the door-post of the half-open drawing-room door, whilst he watched the movements of the men, had heard every syllable of the colloquy. Coming round to see what progress was being made in the house, before he went to the works for the day, it chanced that he arrived at the same time as Turtle's cart. The new piano was a present from himself to Bessy.
Turtle's men leaving the piano in the hall, went into the room to finish the carpet, and Jelly came out of it. She found her arm touched by Mr. Richard North. He motioned her into the dining-room: followed, and closed the door.
"Will you tell me the meaning of what you have just been saying to Molly Green?"