To place Collinson there was to insure him perfect immunity from the approach of an enemy, as well as from any confidential advances of his fellow sentry.

This done, he drew a cigar from his pocket, and handing it to Collinson, lighted another for himself, and leaning back comfortably against a large boulder, glanced complacently at his companion.
"You may smoke until I go, Mr.Collinson, and even afterwards, if you keep the bowl of your pipe behind a rock, so as to be out of sight of your fellow sentry, whose advances, by the way, if I were you, I should not encourage.

Your position here, you see, is a rather peculiar one.
You were saying, I think, that a lingering affection for your wife impelled you to keep this place for her, although you were convinced of her death ?" Collinson's unaffected delight in Chivers's kindliness had made his eyes shine in the moonlight with a doglike wistfulness.

"I reckon I did say that, Mr.Chivers," he said apologetically, "though it ain't goin' to interfere with you usin' the shanty jest now." "I wasn't alluding to that, Collinson," returned Chivers, with a large rhetorical wave of the hand, and an equal enjoyment in his companion's evident admiration of him, "but it struck me that your remark, nevertheless, implied some doubt of your wife's death, and I don't know but that your doubts are right." "Wot's that ?" said Collinson, with a dull glow in his face.
Chivers blew the smoke of his cigar lazily in the still air.

"Listen," he said.