The fire dropped suddenly out of Collinson's eyes, the glow from his face, and the dull look of unwearied patience returned.
"That's all very kind and purty of yer, Mr.Chivers," he said gravely; "you've got all my wife's pints thar to a dot, and it seems to fit her jest like a shoe I picked up t'other day.

But it wasn't my Sadie, for ef she's living or had lived, she'd bin just yere!" The same fear and recognition of some unknown reserve in this trustful man came over Chivers as before.

In his angry resentment of it he would have liked to blurt out the infidelity of the wife before her husband, but he knew Collinson would not believe him, and he had another purpose now.

His full lips twisted into a suave smile.
"While I would not give you false hopes, Mr.Collinson," he said, with a bland smile, "my interest in you compels me to say that you may be over confident and wrong.

There are a thousand things that may have prevented your wife from coming to you,--illness, possibly the result of her exposure, poverty, misapprehension of your place of meeting, and, above all, perhaps some false report of your own death.