“God has been very good to me in spite of all!” he murmured. “Very, very good, and ‘the best is yet to be’!”
He turned and was about to start back toward the house when the cloppa-cloppa-clop of hoofs along the street arrested his attention. Coming into view, past Laura and her group of scholars, an old-fashioned buggy, drawn by a horse of ripe years, was bearing down toward Snug Haven.
In the buggy sat an old, old man, wizen and bent. With an effort he reined in the aged horse. The captain heard his cracked tones on the still afternoon air:
“Pardon me, but can you tell me where Captain Briggs lives—Captain Alpheus Briggs?”
A babel of childish voices and the pointing of numerous fingers obliterated any information Laura tried to give. The old man, with thanks, clucked to his horse, and so the buggy came along once more to the front gate of Snug Haven. There it stopped.
Out of it bent a feeble, shrunken figure, with flaccid skin on deep-lined face, with blinking eyes behind big spectacles.
“Is that you, captain?” asked a shaking voice that pierced to the captain’s heart with a stab of poignant recollection. “Oh, Captain—Captain Briggs—is that you?”
The captain, turning pale, steadied himself by gripping at the whitewashed gate. For a moment his staring eyes met the eyes of the old, withered man in the buggy. Then, in strange, husky tones he cried:
“God above! It—it can’t be you, doctor? It can’t be—Dr. Filhiol?”