Second Period Third Narrative - Chapter VIII

"That's settled!" he said. "Now, about the future--your future, I mean.
To my mind, the result of the extraordinary turn which the matter has
now taken is briefly this. In the first place, we are sure that Rachel
has told you the whole truth, as plainly as words can tell it. In the
second place--though we know that there must be some dreadful mistake
somewhere--we can hardly blame her for believing you to be guilty, on
the evidence of her own senses; backed, as that evidence has been, by
circumstances which appear, on the face of them, to tell dead against
you."

There I interposed. "I don't blame Rachel," I said. "I only regret that
she could not prevail on herself to speak more plainly to me at the
time."

"You might as well regret that Rachel is not somebody else," rejoined
Mr. Bruff. "And even then, I doubt if a girl of any delicacy, whose
heart had been set on marrying you, could have brought herself to charge
you to your face with being a thief. Anyhow, it was not in Rachel's
nature to do it. In a very different matter to this matter of
yours--which placed her, however, in a position not altogether unlike
her position towards you--I happen to know that she was influenced by
a similar motive to the motive which actuated her conduct in your case.
Besides, as she told me herself, on our way to town this evening, if
she had spoken plainly, she would no more have believed your denial then
than she believes it now. What answer can you make to that? There is no
answer to be made to it. Come, come, Mr. Franklin! my view of the case
has been proved to be all wrong, I admit--but, as things are now, my
advice may be worth having for all that. I tell you plainly, we shall be
wasting our time, and cudgelling our brains to no purpose, if we attempt
to try back, and unravel this frightful complication from the beginning.
Let us close our minds resolutely to all that happened last year at Lady
Verinder's country house; and let us look to what we CAN discover in the
future, instead of to what we can NOT discover in the past."