- Franklin feels like he's going crazy – how could his nightshirt have the stain on it?
- Betteredge comes up to him to see what's going on, and is just as dumbfounded.
- Betteredge recommends that Franklin read the letter.
- In the first line of the letter, Rosanna confesses that she was in love with Franklin.
- He's shocked – he had no idea.
- Rosanna's letter tells him that when she was making his bed the morning after the Moonstone disappeared, she saw the smear of paint on his nightgown!
- She was shocked, but not unhappy.
- She felt that if Franklin was a thief, he wasn't all that different from her, after all.
- So she decided to help cover for him, and so she took the nightgown away to hide it, snuck to Frizinghall to buy the fabric to buy a new one, and pretended to have a headache to give herself enough time to make the new one.
- After finishing the letter, Betteredge and Franklin go back to the house to discuss it.
- They have no idea what to do next.
- Just then, there's a knock at the door – it's Ezra Jennings, Mr. Candy's assistant.
- Mr. Candy never recovered from the bad fever he got the night of Rachel's birthday party (remember, he drove home in an open carriage through a rainstorm), so Ezra Jennings has taken over most of his practice.
- Franklin has never seen Jennings before, and is startled by his odd appearance.
- Ezra Jennings' hair is black on the top, but white around the sides, with just a stark line dividing the two – no shades of gray.
- He also has a fairly dark complexion.
- He's just dropping off a list of sick people in the neighborhood, since Rachel likes for Gabriel Betteredge to send medicine and food to their poorer neighbors when they're sick.
- After he leaves, Betteredge tells Franklin that Jennings is unpopular in the neighborhood because he's a stranger and seems foreign.