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.

If he still advertised for his son he did not offer rewards for
information any more; for, with the muddled lucidity of a mental
derangement he had reasoned himself into a conviction as clear as
daylight that he had already attained all that could be expected in that
way. What more could he want? Colebrook was the place, and there was no
need to ask for more. Miss Carvil praised him for his good sense, and
he was soothed by the part she took in his hope, which had become his
delusion; in that idea which blinded his mind to truth and probability,
just as the other old man in the other cottage had been made blind, by
another disease, to the light and beauty of the world.

But anything he could interpret as a doubt--any coldness of assent, or
even a simple inattention to the development of his projects of a home