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As yet no one had recognised him. He had arrived the night before, and taken a room at the Pack-horse, nobody asking his name; had sat after supper in a corner of the smoking-room and listened to the gossip there, saying nothing.

“Who’s he travellin’ for?” somebody had asked of Abel Walters, the landlord. “He ain’t a commercial. He han’t got the trunks, only a kit-bag. By the soft hat he wears I should say a agent in advance. Likely we’ll have a circus before long.”

His father and mother were dead these ten years. He had sent home money to pay the funeral expenses and buy a substantial headstone. But he had not been up to the cemetery yet. He was not a sentimental man. Still, he had expected his return to make some little stir in Tregarrick, and now a shade of disappointment began to creep over his humour.

He flung away the end of his cigar and strolled up the sunny pavement to a sweetshop where he had once bought ha’porths of liquorice and cinnamon-rock. The legend, “E. Hosking, Maker of Cheesecakes to Queen Victoria,” still decorated the window. He entered and demanded a pound of best “fairing,” smiling at the magnificence of the order. Mrs. Hosking–her white mob–cap and apron clean as ever–offered him a macaroon for luck, and weighed out the sweets. Her hand shook more than of old.

“You don’t remember me, Mrs. Hosking?”

“What is it you say? You must speak a little louder, please, I’m deaf.”

“You don’t remember me?”

“No, I don’t,” she said composedly. “I’m gone terrible blind this last year or two.”

The Emigrant paid for his sweets and walked out. He had bought them with a purpose, and now bent his steps down Market Street. At the foot of the hill he paused before a row of white-washed cottages. A green fence ran along their front, and a pebbled path; and here he found a stout, matronly woman bent over a wash-tub.

“Does Mrs. Best live here?” he asked.

The woman withdrew about a dozen pins from her mouth and answered all in one breath:–

“She isn’t called Best any longer; she married agen five year ago; second husbing, he died too; she doesn’ live here any more.”

With this she stuck the pins very deliberately, one by one, in the bosom of her print gown, and plunged her hands into the wash-tub again.

The Emigrant stood nonplussed for a moment and scratched the back of his head, tilting his soft hat still further forward on his nose.

“She used to be very fond of me when I was a boy,” he said lamely.

“Yes?” The tone seemed to ask what business that could be of hers.

“She came as nurse to my mother when I was born. I suppose that made her take a fancy to me.”

“Ah, no doubt,” replied the woman vaguely, and added, while she soaped a long black stocking, “she did a lot o’ that, one time and another.” “She had a little girl of her own before I left Tregarrick,” the Emigrant persisted, not because she appeared interested–she did not, at all–but with some vague hope of making himself appear a little less trivial. “Lizzie she called her. I suppose you don’t know what has become of the old woman?”

“Well, considerin’ that I’m her daughter Elizabeth”–she lengthened the name with an implied reproof–“I reckon I ought to know.”

The Emigrant’s hand sought and crushed the big packet of sweets well into his pocket. He flushed scarlet. At the same time he could hardly keep back a smile at his absurd mistake. To be here with lollipops for a woman of thirty and more!

“You haven’t any little ones of your own?”

“No, I haven’t. Why?”

“Oh, well; only a question. My name is Peter Jago–Pete, I used to be called.”