"Then your recognition of me was accidental?"

"Wa'al, yes. And ez I never took much stock in the stories that you were
washed off the Warensboro Bridge, I ain't much astonished at finding you
agin."

"What did you believe happened to me?" said Blandford, less brusquely.

Ezekiel noticed the softening; he felt his own turn coming. "I
kalkilated you had reasons for going off, leaving no address behind
you," he drawled.

"What reasons?" asked Blandford, with a sudden relapse of his former
harshness.

"Wa'al, Squire Blandford, sens you wanter know--I reckon your business
wasn't payin', and there was a matter of two hundred and fifty dollars
ye took with ye, that your creditors would hev liked to hev back."

"Who dare say that?" demanded Blandford, angrily.

"Your wife that was--Mrs. Demorest ez is--told it to her mother,"
returned Ezekiel, lazily.

The blow struck deeper than even Ezekiel's dry malice imagined. For an
instant, Blandford remained stupefied. In the five years' retrospect of
his resolution on that fatal night, whatever doubt of its wisdom might
have obtruded itself upon him, he had never thought of THIS. He had been
willing to believe that his wife had quietly forgotten him as well as
her treachery to him, he had passively acquiesced in the results of that