Even then he palliated their outrage with his characteristic patience, keeping still his strange fascination for Chivers, and his blind belief in his miserable wife.

The story was at times broken by lapses of faintness, by a singular return of his old abstraction and forgetfulness in the midst of a sentence, and at last by a fit of coughing that left a few crimson bubbles on the corners of his month.

Key lifted his eyes anxiously; there was some grave internal injury, which the dying man's resolute patience had suppressed.

Yet, at the sound of Alice's returning step, Collinson's eyes brightened, apparently as much at her coming as from the effect of the powerful stimulant Key had taken from his medicine case.
"I thank ye, Mr.Key," he said faintly; "for I've got an idea I ain't got no great time before me, and I've got suthin' to say to you, afore witnesses"-- his eyes sought Alice's in half apology--"afore witnesses, you understand.

Would you mind standin' out thar, afore me, in the light, so I kin see you both, and you, miss, rememberin', ez a witness, suthin' I got to tell to him?
You might take his hand, miss, to make it more regular and lawlike." The two did as he bade them, standing side by side, painfully humoring what seemed to them to be wanderings of a dying man.
"Thar was a young fellow," said Collinson in a steady voice, "ez kem to my shanty a night ago on his way to the--the--valley.