In their intimacy of back yard and front garden he talked with her paternally, reasonably, and dogmatically, with a touch of arbitrariness.  They met on the ground of unreserved confidence, which was authenticated by an affectionate wink now and then.  Miss Carvil had come to look forward rather to these winks.  At first they had discomposed her:  the poor fellow was mad.  Afterwards she had learned to laugh at them:  there was no harm in him.  Now she was aware of an unacknowledged, pleasurable, incredulous emotion, expressed by a faint blush.  He winked not in the least vulgarly; his thin red face with a well-modelled curved nose, had a sort of distinction—­the more so that when he talked to her he looked with a steadier and more intelligent glance.  A handsome, hale, upright, capable man, with a white beard.  You did not think of his age.  His son, he affirmed, had resembled him amazingly from his earliest babyhood.

Harry would be one-and-thirty next July, he declared.  Proper age to get married with a nice, sensible girl that could appreciate a good home.  He was a very high-spirited boy.  High-spirited husbands were the easiest to manage.  These mean, soft chaps, that you would think butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, were the ones to make a woman thoroughly miserable.  And there was nothing like a home—­a fireside—­a good roof:  no turning out of your warm bed in all sorts of weather.  “Eh, my dear?”

Captain Hagberd had been one of those sailors that pursue their calling within sight of land.  One of the many children of a bankrupt farmer, he had been apprenticed hurriedly to a coasting skipper, and had remained on the coast all his sea life.  It must have been a hard one at first:  he had never taken to it; his affection turned to the land, with its innumerable houses, with its quiet lives gathered round its firesides.  Many sailors feel and profess a rational dislike for the sea, but his was a profound and emotional animosity—­as if the love of the stabler element had been bred into him through many generations.

“People did not know what they let their boys in for when they let them go to sea,” he expounded to Bessie.  “As soon make convicts of them at once.”  He did not believe you ever got used to it.  The weariness of such a life got worse as you got older.  What sort of trade was it in which more than half your time you did not put your foot inside your house?  Directly you got out to sea you had no means of knowing what went on at home.  One might have thought him weary of distant voyages; 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.