TO-MORROW
Page: 5

promising, 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 in-
ferior 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 noth-
ing about his son's return because with him it was
no longer "next week," "next month," or even
"next year." It was "to-morrow."

In their intimacy of back yard and front gar-
den 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 in-
telligent glance. A handsome, hale, upright, ca-
pable 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 wom-
an 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,