While they were gazing, the door of the closet opened and Mrs Gaff came out. She was a little stouter, perhaps, than she had been five years before, but not a whit less hale or good-looking.
“Mother—God bless her!” murmured Billy in a deep earnest voice.
“Where can Tottie be?” whispered Gaff anxiously.
“Maybe she’s out,” said Billy.
The lad’s voice trembled while he spoke, for he could not but reflect that five years was a long long time, and Tottie might be dead.
Before Gaff spoke again, the closet door once more opened, and a slender sprightly girl just budding into womanhood tripped across the room.
“Hallo!” exclaimed Billy, “who can that—surely! impossible! yes it is, it must be Tot, for I could never mistake her mouth!”
“D’ye see any sign of—of—a man?” said Gaff in a voice so deep and peculiar, that his son turned and looked at him in surprise.
“No, daddy—why? what d’ye ask that for?”
“’Cause it’s not the first time a sailor has comed home, after bein’ many years away, and found that his wife had guv him up for dead, an’ married again.”