“Well, I never did, and how are you, Harry?”
They looked at one another kindly but with a question piercing through the kindness and an effort to divine the unknowable without betraying curiosity. The kindness did, in fact, melt away the almost physical obstacle of twenty years spent apart and in ignorance of one another.
“When did you leave the old place?” said the sailor.
“Soon after you did yourself, Harry; just after the shipwreck of the Wild Swan; twenty-one, twenty-two—yes, twenty-two years ago.”
“Is it so long? I could have sworn you had that beard when I saw you last,” and the sailor looked at him in a way that showed he had already bridged the twenty-two years and knew the man.
“Yes, twenty-two years.”
“And do you ever go back to the old place? How’s Charlie Nash, and young Woolford, and the shepherd?”
“Let me see——”
“But how is Maggie Looker?” broke in the sailor upon a genial answer in the bud.