re is he now?" said Mrs. Tucker, suddenly facing them.

They looked at each other, and then looked at Mrs. Tucker.
Then both together replied slowly and in perfect unison,
"That's--what--we--want--to--know." They seemed so satisfied
with this effect that they as deliberately repeated,
"Yes--that's--what--we--want--to--know."

Between the shock of meeting the partner of her husband's guilt and
the unexpected revelation to her inexperience, that in suggestion and
appearance there was nothing beyond the recollection of that guilt that
was really shocking in the woman--between the extravagant extremes
of hope and fear suggested by their words, there was something so
grotesquely absurd in the melodramatic chorus that she with difficulty
suppressed a hysterical laugh.

"That's the way to take it," said the woman, putting her own
good-humored interpretation upon Mrs. Tucker's expression. "Now, look
here! I'll tell you all about it." She carefully selected the most
comfortable chair, and sitting down, lightly crossed her hands in her
lap. "Well, I left here on the 13th of last January on the ship Argo,
calculating that your husband would join the ship just inside the Heads.
That was our arrangement, but if anything happened to prevent him, he
was to join me in Acapulco. Well! He didn't come aboard, and we sailed
without him. But it appears now he did attempt to join the ship, but his
boat was capsized. There, now, don't be alarmed! he wasn't drowned, as
Patterson can swear to--no, catch HIM! not a hair of him was hurt; but
I--I was bundled off to the end of the earth in Mexico, alone, without a
cent to bless me. For true as you live, that hound of a captain, when he
found, as he thought, that Spencer was nabbed, he just confiscated all
his trunks and valuables and left me in the lurch. If I hadn't met a man
down there that offered to marry me and brought me here, I might have
died there, I reckon. But I did, and here I am. I went down there as
your husband's sweetheart, I've come back as the wife of an honest man,
and I reckon it's about square!"

There was something so startlingly frank, so hopelessly self-satisfied,
so contagiously good-humored in the woman's perfect moral
unconsciousness, that even if Mrs. Tucker had been less preoccupied her
resentment would have abated. But her eyes were fixed on the gloomy face
of Patterson, who was beginning to unlock the sepulchres of his memory
and disinter his deeply buried though