"Heaven help the woman!--if it's her work."
"But this must not be breathed aloud," he said, taking alarm. "It may be a false suspicion."
"Don't fear me: it's a thing too grave for me to mix myself up in," was the reply: and to give Mrs. Gass her due, she did look scared in no slight degree. "Dr. Rane, I am sorry for saying what I did to you. It was the impossibility, as I took it, of anything's having left it here but that flutter of papers from your pocketbook. Whoever would have given a thought to Molly Green?"
Dr. Rane made no answer.
"She put her basket down by the door there, and came up the room to look at my geraniums; I held the candle for her. I remember she caught her crinoline on the corner of the iron fender, and it gave her a twist round. The idiots that girls make of themselves with them big crinolines! Perhaps it dropped from her then."
"Well, let us bury it in silence, Mrs. Gass; it is only a doubt at best," said the prudent but less eloquent physician. "You will allow me to take this," he added alluding to the paper. "I should like to examine it at leisure."
"Take it, and welcome," she answered; "I'm glad to be rid of it. As to burying it in silence, we had better, I expect, both do that."
"Even to Richard North," he enjoined rather anxiously.
"Even to Richard North. I have kept secrets in my day, doctor, and can keep 'em again."
Dr. Rane put the paper in his pocketbook, deposited that in the breast-pocket of his coat, and took his departure. But now, being a shrewd man, a suspicion that he would not have given utterance to for the whole world, lay on Dr. Rane--that it was more in accordance with probability that the paper had dropped out of his pocketbook than from Molly Green's petticoats, seeing they were not finished off with fish-hooks.