; and the
longest he had ever made had lasted a fortnight, of which the most part
had been spent at anchor, sheltering from the weather. As soon as his
wife had inherited a house and enough to live on (from a bachelor uncle
who had made some money in the coal business) he threw up his command of
an East-coast collier with a feeling as though he had escaped from the
galleys. After all these years he might have counted on the fingers of
his two hands all the days he had been out of sight of England. He
had never known what it was to be out of soundings. "I have never been
further than eighty fathoms from the land," was one of his boasts.

Bessie Carvil heard all these things. In front of their cottage grew an
under-sized ash; and on summer afternoons she would bring out a chair
on the grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain Hagberd, in his
canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He dug every day in his front plot. He
turned it over and over several times every year, but was not going to
plant anything "just at present."

To Bessie Carvil he would state more explicitly: "Not till our Harry
comes home to-morrow." And she had heard this formula of hope so often
that it only awakened the vaguest pity in her heart for that hopeful old
man.

Everything was put off in that way, and everything was being prepared
likewise for to-morrow. There was a boxful of packets of various
flower-seeds to choose from, for the front garden. "He will doubtless let
you have your say about that, my dear," Captain Hagberd intimated to her
across the railing.

Miss Bessie's head remained bowed over her work. She had heard all this
so many times. But now and then she would rise, lay down her sewing, and
come slowly to the fence. There was a charm in these gentle ravings. He
was determined that his son should not go away again for the want of a
home all ready for him. He had been filling the other cottage with all
sorts of furniture. She imagined it all new, fresh with varnish, piled
up as in a warehouse. There would be tables wrapped up in sacking; rolls
of carpets thick and vertical like fragments of columns, the gleam of
white marble tops in the dimness of the drawn blinds. Captain Hagberd
always described his purchases to her, carefully, as to a person having
a legitimate interest in them. The overgrown yard of his cottage could
be laid over with concrete... after to-morrow.

"We may just as well do away with the fence. You could have your