"Then he is not my husband," replied the poor wife, bursting into
tears. "My husband is a clerk." In the bitterness of a keen
disappointment, rendered sharper by doubt and fear, Mrs. Fletcher
wept for some minutes. When she could command her feelings to some
extent, she thanked the tailor for calling, and repeated what she
had said, that the man at his house could not be her husband.

"He is from Cincinnati, ma'am; and goes there once in every two
weeks. I know that he has wife and child there," said the man.

"Still he cannot be my husband," replied Mrs. Fletcher; "for my
husband is not a tailor."

"No, not in that case, certainly." And the man owed and withdrew.

All day long the wife waited for some more satisfactory reply to her
advertisement, but no farther response to it was made. The call of
the tailor seemed like a mockery of her unhappy condition.

Night came, and all remained in doubt and darkness; and then the
mind of Mrs. Fletcher turned to the visit of the tailor, half
despairingly, in order to find some feeble gleam of hope. Perhaps,
she said to herself, as she thought about it, there is some mistake.
Perhaps it is my husband after all, and the man is in some error
about his being a tailor. As she thought, it suddenly flashed
through her mind that there had been a good deal of mystery made by
her husband about his situation in Cincinnati as well as in
Louisville, which always struck her as a little strange. Could it be
possible that his real business was that of a tailor? All at once
she remembered that her husband had been particularly silent in