Some simple explanation of her proceeding was doubtless within the bounds of possibility; but he himself could not think of one; and he wished that she had placed the matter beyond conjecture by voluntarily saying something about it there and then.
But, though Lizzy had not offered an explanation at the moment, the subject was brought forward by her at the next time of their meeting.

She was chatting to him concerning some other event, and remarked that it happened about the time when she was dusting some old clothes that had belonged to her poor husband.
'You keep them clean out of respect to his memory ?' said Stockdale tentatively.
'I air and dust them sometimes,' she said, with the most charming innocence in the world.
'Do dead men come out of their graves and walk in mud ?' murmured the minister, in a cold sweat at the deception that she was practising.
'What did you say ?' asked Lizzy.
'Nothing, nothing,' said he mournfully.

'Mere words--a phrase that will do for my sermon next Sunday.' It was too plain that Lizzy was unaware that he had seen actual pedestrian splashes upon the skirts of the tell- tale overcoat, and that she imagined him to believe it had come direct from some chest or drawer.
The aspect of the case was now considerably darker.

Stockdale was so much depressed by it that he did not challenge her explanation, or threaten to go off as a missionary to benighted islanders, or reproach her in any way whatever.

He simply parted from her when she had done talking, and lived on in perplexity, till by degrees his natural manner became sad and constrained..