“Ha, ha, ha!  Why, of course, Colebrook.  Where else?  That’s the only place in the United Kingdom for your long-lost sons.  So he sold up his old home in Colchester, and down he comes here.  Well, it’s a craze, like any other.  Wouldn’t catch me going crazy over any of my youngsters clearing out.  I’ve got eight of them at home.”  The barber was showing off his strength of mind in the midst of a laughter that shook the tap-room.

Strange, though, that sort of thing, he would confess, with the frankness of a superior intelligence, seemed to be catching.  His establishment, for instance, was near the harbour, and whenever a sailor-man came in for a hair-cut or a shave—­if it was a strange face he couldn’t help thinking directly, “Suppose he’s the son of old Hagberd!” He laughed at himself for it.  It was a strong craze.  He could remember the time when the whole town was full of it.  But he had his hopes of the old chap yet.  He would cure him by a course of judicious chaffing.  He was watching the progress of the treatment.  Next week—­next month—­next year!  When the old skipper had put off the date of that return till next year, he would be well on his way to not saying any more about it.  In other matters he was quite rational, so this, too, was bound to come.  Such was the barber’s firm opinion.

Nobody had ever contradicted him; his own hair had gone grey since that time, and Captain Hagberd’s beard had turned quite white, and had acquired a majestic flow over the No. 1 canvas suit, which he had made for himself secretly with tarred twine, and had assumed suddenly, coming out in it one fine morning, whereas the evening before he had been seen going home in his mourning of broadcloth.  It caused a sensation in the High Street—­shopkeepers coming to their doors, people in the houses snatching up their hats to run out—­a stir at which he seemed strangely surprised at first, and then scared; but his only answer to the wondering questions was that startled and evasive, “For the present.”

That sensation had been forgotten, long ago; and Captain Hagberd himself, if not forgotten, had come to be disregarded—­the penalty of dailiness—­as the sun itself is disregarded unless it makes its power felt heavily.  Captain Hagberd’s movements showed no infirmity:  he walked stiffly in his suit of canvas, a quaint and remarkable figure; only his eyes wandered more furtively perhaps than of yore.  His manner abroad had lost its excitable watchfulness; it had become puzzled and diffident, as though he had suspected that there was somewhere about him something slightly compromising, some embarrassing oddity; and yet had remained unable to discover what on earth this something wrong could be.

He was unwilling now to talk with the townsfolk.  He had earned for himself the reputation of an awful skinflint, of a miser in the matter of living.  He mumbled regretfully in the shops, bought inferior scraps of meat after long hesitations; and discouraged all allusions to his costume.  It was as the barber had foretold.  For all one could tell, he had recovered already from the disease of hope; and only Miss Bessie Carvil knew that he said nothing about his son’s return because with him it was no longer “next week,” “next month,” or even “next year.”  It was “to-morrow.”