Jelly--to whom we are obliged to refer rather frequently, as she holds some important threads of the story in her hands--found times went very hard with her. A death within the house in addition to the death close without it, was almost more than Jelly could well put up with in her present state of mind. The startling circumstances that had characterized Mrs. Rane\'s demise did not attend Mrs. Cumberland\'s: but it had been very sudden at last, and Jelly was sincerely attached to her mistress.

Dr. Rane was left sole executor to his mother\'s will. It was a very simple one: she bequeathed to him all she had. That was not much; for a portion of her income died with her. He found that he had two hundred a-year--as he had always known that he should have--and her household furniture. Of ready money there was little. When he should have discharged trifling claims and paid the funeral expenses, some twenty or thirty pounds would remain over, that was all.

Dr. Rane acted promptly. He discharged two of the servants, Ann and Dinah, retaining Jelly for the present to look after the house. He wished, if he could, to get the furniture taken with the house; so he advertised it in the local papers. He had been advertising his practice--I think this has been already said--but nothing satisfactory had come of it. Inquiries had been made, but they all dropped through. Perhaps Dr. Rane was too honest to say his practice was worth much, or to conceal the fact that Mr. Seeley had the best of it in Dallory. Neither was the tontine money as yet paid over to him; and, putting out of consideration all other business, the doctor must have waited for that.

Now, of all things that could have happened, Jelly most disliked and dreaded being left alone in the house. From having been as physically brave as a woman can be, she had latterly become one of the most timid. She started at her own shadow; she would not for the world have entered alone at night the room in which Mrs. Cumberland died. Having seen one ghost, Jelly could not feel sure that she should not see two. Some people hold a theory that to a very few persons in this world--and not to others--is given the faculty, or whatever you may please to call it, of discerning supernatural sights or visions. Jelly had heard this: and she became possessed of the idea that for some wise purpose she had been suddenly endowed with it. To remain in the house alone was more than her brain would bear; and she selected Ketler\'s eldest girl, a starved damsel of thirteen, called "Riah," to come and keep her company. As it was one less to feed, and they had tried in vain to get Riah a place--for the strike and badness of trade had affected all classes, and less servants seemed to be wanted everywhere--Ketler and his wife were very glad to let her go.

How do rumours get about? Can any one tell? How did a certain rumour get about and begin to be whispered in Dallory? Certainly no one there could have told. Jelly could have been upon her Bible oath if necessary (or thought she could) that she had not set it floating. It was a very ugly one, whoever had done it.

Late one afternoon Jelly received a call from Mrs. Gass\'s smart housemaid. The girl brought a letter from her mistress; Mrs. Gass wanted very particularly to see Jelly, and had sent to say that Jelly was to go there as soon as she could. Jelly made no sort of objection. She had been confined to the house much more closely of late than she approved of: partly because Dr. Rane had charged her to be in the way in case people called to look over it: partly because she had found out that Miss Riah had a tendency to walk off, herself, if she could get Jelly\'s back turned.

"Now, mind you sit still in the kitchen and attend to the fire, and listen to the door; and perhaps I\'ll bring you home a pair of strings for that bonnet of yours," said Jelly to the girl, when she was ready to start. "The doctor will be in by-and-by, so don\'t attempt to get out of the way."

With these injunctions, Jelly began her walk. She had on her best new mourning--and was in a complaisant mood. It looked inclined to rain--the weather had been uncertain of late--but Jelly had her umbrella: a silk one that had belonged to her mistress, and that Dr. Rane had given, with many other things, to Jelly. She rather wondered what Mrs. Gass wanted with her, but supposed it was to tell her of a situation. It had been arranged that if an eligible one offered, Jelly should be at liberty to depart, and a woman might be placed in the house to take care of it. Mrs. Gass had said she would let Jelly know if she heard of anything desirable. So away went Jelly with a fleet foot, little thinking what was in store for her.

Mrs. Gass, wearing mourning also, was in her usual sitting-room, the dining-room. As Jelly entered, the smart maid was carrying out the tea-tray. Mrs. Gass stirred up her fire, and bade Jelly to a chair near it, drawing her own pretty closely to her.

"Just see whether that girl have shut the door fast before I begin," suggested Mrs. Gass. "It won\'t do to have ears listening to me."

Jelly went, saw the door was closed, came back and sat down again. She noticed that Mrs. Gass looked keenly at her, as if studying her face before speaking.

"Jelly, what is it that you have been saying about Dr. Rane?"

The question was so unexpected that Jelly did not immediately answer it. Quite a change, this, from an offer of a nice situation.

"I\'ve said nothing," she replied.

"Now don\'t you repeat that to me. You have. And it would have been a\'most as well for you that you had cut your tongue out before doing it."

"I said--what I did--to you, Mrs. Gass. To nobody else."

"Look here, Jelly--the mischiefs done, and you\'d a great deal better look it full in the face than deny it. There\'s reports getting up about Dr. Rane, in regard to his wife\'s death, and no mortal woman or man can have set \'em afloat but you. This morning I was in North Inlet, looking a bit after them scamps of workmen that won\'t work, and won\'t let others work if they can help it: and after I had given a taste of my mind to as many of \'em as was standing about, I stepped into Mother Green\'s. She has the rheumatics--and he has a touch of \'em. Talking with her of one thing and another, we got on to the subject of Dr. Rane and the tontine; and she said two or three words that frightened me; frightened me, Jelly; for they pointed to a suspicion that the doctor had sacrificed his wife to get it. I pretended to understand nothing--she didn\'t speak out broad enough for me to take it up and answer her--and it was the best plan not to understand----"

"For an old woman, Mother Green has the longest tongue I know," interrupted Jelly.

"You\'ve a longer," retorted Mrs. Gass. "Just wait till I\'ve finished, girl. \'Twas a tolerable fine morning, and after that I went walking on, and struck off down by the Wheatsheaf. Packerton\'s wife was standing at the door with cherry ribbons in her cap, and I stopped to talk to her. She brought up Dr. Rane; and lowered her voice as if it was high treason; asking me if I\'d heard what was being said about his wife\'s not having died a natural death. I did give it the woman; and I think I frightened her. She acknowledged that she only spoke from a hint dropped by Timothy Wilks, and said she had thought at the time it couldn\'t have anything in it. But what I have to say to you is this," continued Mrs. Gass to Jelly more emphatically, "whether it\'s Tim Wilks that\'s spreading the report, or whether it\'s Mother Green, they both had it in the first place from you."

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.

"They don\'t."

"Why, Mrs. Gass, they do."

"Let\'s go over \'em, and see," said Mrs. Gass, who had a plain way of convincing people. "Let\'s begin at the beginning. Hear me out, Jelly."

She went over the past minutely. Jelly listened, growing more uncomfortable every moment. There was absolutely not one fact inconsistent with a natural death. It is true the demise had been speedy, but the cause assigned, exhaustion, might have been the real one; and the hasty fastening down of the coffin was no doubt a simple measure of precaution, taken out of regard for the living. No; as Mrs. Gass put it in her sensible way, there was positively not a single fact that could be urged for supposing that Mrs. Rane came to an untimely end. Jelly twirled her gloves, and twisted her hands, and grew hot and uncomfortable.

"There was what I saw--the ghost," she said.

But Mrs. Gass ridiculed the ghost--that is, the idea of it--beyond everything earthly. Jelly, however, would not give way there; and they had some sparring.

"Ghost, indeed! and you come to this age! It was the beer, girl; the beer."

"I hadn\'t had a drop of beer," protested Jelly, almost crying. "How was I to get beer at Ketler\'s? They\'ve none for themselves. I had had nothing inside my lips but tea."

"Well; beer or no beer, ghost or no ghost, it strikes me, Jelly, that you have done a pretty thing. This story is as sure to get wind now as them geraniums of mine will have air when I open the window tomorrow morning. You\'ll be called upon to substantiate your story; and when you can\'t--and I\'m sure you know that you can\'t--the law may have you up to answer for it. I once knew a man that rose a bad charge against another; he was tried for it, and got seven years\' transportation. You may come to the same."

A very agreeable prospect! If Jelly\'s bonnet had not been on, her hair might have risen up on end with horror. There could be no doubt that it was she who had started the report; and in this moment of repentance she sat really wishing she had first cut her foolish tongue out.

"Nothing can be done now," concluded Mrs. Gass. "There\'s just one chance for you--that the rumour may die away. If it will, let it; and take warning to be more cautious in future. The probability is that Mother Green and Tim Wilks have mentioned it to others besides me and Packerton\'s wife: if so, nothing will keep it under. You have been a great fool, Jelly."

Jelly went away in terrible fright. Mrs. Gass had laid the matter before her in its true light. Suspect as she might, she had no proof; and if questioned by authority could not have advanced one.

"Dr. Rane have been in here three times after you," was young Riah\'s salutation when Jelly reached home............