Jelly sat in discomfort. She did not like this. It is nothing to be charged with a fault when you are wholly innocent; but when conscience says you are partly guilty it is another thing. Jelly was aware that one night at Mother Green's, taking supper with that old matron and Timothy, she had so far yielded to the seductions of social gossip as to forget her usual reticence; and had said rather more than she ought. Still, at the worst, it had been only a word or two: a hint, not a specific charge.
"I may have let fall an incautious word there," confessed Jelly. "But it was nothing anybody can take hold of."
"Don't you make sure of that," reprimanded Mrs. Gass. "We are told in the sacred writings--which it's not well to mention in ordinary talk, and I'd only do it with reverence--of a grain of mustard seed, that's the least of all seeds when it's sown, and grows into the greatest tree. You remember Who it is says that, Jelly, so it's not for me to enlarge upon it. But I may say this much, girl, that that's an apt exemplification of gossip. You drop one word, or maybe only half a one, and it goes spreading out pretty nigh over the world."
"I'm sure, what with the weight and worry this dreadful secret has been on my mind, almost driving me mad, the wonder is that I've been able to keep as silent as I have," put in Jelly, who was growing cross. Mrs. Gass resumed.
"If the thing is what you think it to be---a dreadful secret, and it is brought to light through you, why, I don't know that you'd get blamed--though there's many a one will say you might have spared your mistress's son and left it for others to charge him. But suppose it turns out to be no dreadful secret; suppose poor Bessy Rane died a natural death of the fever, what then?--where would you be?"
Jelly took off her black gloves as if they had grown suddenly hot for her hands. She said nothing.
"Look here, girl. My belief is that you've just set a brand on fire! one that won't be put out until it's burnt out. My firm belief also is, that you be altogether mistaken. I have thought the matter over with myself hour after hour; and, except at the first moment when you whispered it to me in the churchyard, and I own I was startled, I have never been able to bring my common sense to believe in it. Oliver Rane loved his wife too well to hurt a hair of her head."
"There was that anonymous letter," cried Jelly.
"Whatever hand he might have had in that anonymous letter--and nobody knows the truth of it whether he had or whether he hadn't--I don't believe he was the man to hurt a hair of his wife's head," repeated Mrs. Gass. "And for you to be spreading it about that he murdered her!"
"The circumstances all point to it," said Jelly.