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 drying-line out, quite clear of your flowers.”  He winked, and she would blush faintly.

This madness that had entered her life through the kind impulses of her heart had reasonable details.  What if some day his son returned?  But she could not even be quite sure that he ever had a son; and if he existed anywhere he had been too long away.  When Captain Hagberd got excited in his talk she would steady him by a pretence of belief, laughing a little to salve her conscience.

Only once she had tried pityingly to throw some doubt on that hope doomed to disappointment, but the effect of her attempt had scared her very much.  All at once over that man’s face there came an expression of horror and incredulity, as though he had seen a crack open out in the firmament.

“You—­you—­you don’t think he’s drowned!”

For a moment he seemed to her ready to go out of his mind, for in his ordinary state she thought him more sane than people gave him credit for.  On that occasion the violence of the emotion was followed by a most paternal and complacent recovery.

“Don’t alarm yourself, my dear,” he said a little cunningly:  “the sea can’t keep him.  He does not belong to it.  None of us Hagberds ever did belong to it.  Look at me; I didn’t get drowned.  Moreover, he isn’t a sailor at all; and if he is not a sailor he’s bound to come back.  There’s nothing to prevent him coming back. . . .”