“And he must look upon you as already provided for, in a manner.  That’s the best of it with the girls.  The husbands . . .”  He winked.  Miss Bessie, absorbed in her knitting, coloured faintly.

“Bessie! my hat!” old Carvil bellowed out suddenly.  He had been sitting under the tree mute and motionless, like an idol of some remarkably monstrous superstition.  He never opened his mouth but to howl for her, at her, sometimes about her; and then he did not moderate the terms of his abuse.  Her system was never to answer him at all; and he kept up his shouting till he got attended to—­till she shook him by the arm, or thrust the mouthpiece of his pipe between his teeth.  He was one of the few blind people who smoke.  When he felt the hat being put on his head he stopped his noise at once.  Then he rose, and they passed together through the gate.

He weighed heavily on her arm.  During their slow, toilful walks she appeared to be dragging with her for a penance the burden of that infirm bulk.  Usually they crossed the road at once (the cottages stood in the fields near the harbour, two hundred yards away from the end of the street), and for a long, long time they would remain in view, ascending imperceptibly the flight of wooden steps that led to the top of the sea-wall.  It ran on from east to west, shutting out the Channel like a neglected railway embankment, on which no train had ever rolled within memory of man.  Groups of sturdy fishermen would emerge upon the sky, walk along for a bit, and sink without haste.  Their brown nets, like the cobwebs of gigantic spiders, lay on the shabby grass of the slope; and, looking up from the end of the street, the people of the town would recognise the two Carvils by the creeping slowness of their gait.  Captain Hagberd, pottering aimlessly about his cottages, would raise his head to see how they got on in their promenade.

He advertised still in the Sunday papers for Harry Hagberd.  These sheets were read in foreign parts to the end of the world, he informed Bessie.  At the same time he seemed to think that his son was in England—­so near to Colebrook that he would of course turn up “to-morrow.”  Bessie, without committing herself to that opinion in so many words, argued that in that case the expense of advertising was unnecessary; Captain Hagberd had better spend that weekly half-crown on himself.  She declared she did not know what he lived on.  Her argumentation would puzzle him and cast him down for a time.  “They all do it,” he pointed out.  There was a whole column devoted to appeals after missing relatives.  He would bring the newspaper to show her.  He and his wife had advertised for years; only she was an impatient woman.  The news from Colebrook had arrived the very day after her funeral; if she had not been so impatient she might have been here now, with no more than one day more to wait.  “You are not an impatient woman, my dear.”

“I’ve no patience with you sometimes,” she would say.