To-morrow

What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook was
not exactly in his favour. He did not belong to the place. He had come
to settle there under circumstances not at all mysterious--he used to
be very communicative about them at the time--but extremely morbid and
unreasonable. He was possessed of some little money evidently, because
he bought a plot of ground, and had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages
run up very cheaply. He occupied one of them himself and let the other
to Josiah Carvil--blind Carvil, the retired boat-builder--a man of evil
repute as a domestic tyrant.

These cottages had one wall in common, shared in a line of iron railing
dividing their front gardens; a wooden fence separated their back
gardens. Miss Bessie Carvil was allowed, as it were of right, to throw
over it the tea-cloths, blue rags, or an apron that wanted drying.

"It rots the wood, Bessie my girl," the captain would remark mildly,
from his side of the fence, each time he saw her exercising that
privilege.

She was a tall girl; the fence was low, and she could spread her elbows
on the top. Her hands would be red with the bit of washing she had
done, but her forearms were white and shapely, and she would look at her
father's landlord in silence--in an informed silence which had an air of
knowledge, expectation and desire.

"It rots the wood," repeated Captain Hagberd. "It is the only unthrifty,
careless habit I know in you. Why don't you have a clothes line out in
your back yard?"

Miss Carvil would say nothing to this--she only shook her head
negatively. The tiny back yard on her side had a few stone-bordered
little beds of black earth, in which the simple flowers she found time
to cultivate appeared somehow extravagantly overgrown, as if belonging
to an exotic clime; and Captain Hagberd's upright, hale person, clad in
No. 1 sail-cloth from head to foot, would be emerging knee-deep out of
rank grass and the tall weeks on his side of the fence. He appeared,
with the colour and uncouth stiffness of the extraordinary material in
which he chose to clothe himself--"for the time being," would be his
mumbled remark to any observation on the subject--like a man roughened
out of granite, standing in a wilderness not big enough for a decent
billiard-room. A heavy figure of a man of stone, with a red handsome
face, a blue wandering eye, and a great white beard flowing to his waist
and never trimmed as far as Colebrook knew.

Seven years before, he had seriously answered, "Next month, I think,"
to the chaffing attempt to secure his custom made by that distinguished
local wit, the Colebrook barber, who happened to be sitting insolently
in the