So a number of cottagers, for the greater part they were elderly women past the fiercer rush and hurry of life, grandmothers and ancient dames or wives at leisure with their children away at the Council schools, had a caller that afternoon. Cottages are such lonely places in the daytime that even district visitors and canvassers are godsends and only tramps ill received. Captain Douglas ranked high in the scale of visitors. There was something about him, his fairness, a certain handsomeness, his quick colour, his active speech, which interested women at all times, and now an indefinable flow of romantic excitement conveyed itself to his interlocutors. He encountered the utmost civility everywhere; doors at first tentatively ajar opened wider at the sight of him and there was a kindly disposition to enter into his troubles lengthily and deliberately. People listened attentively to his demands, and before they testified to Bealby’s sustained absence from their perception they would for the most part ask numerous questions in return. They wanted to hear the Captain’s story, the reason for his research, the relationship between himself and the boy, they wanted to feel something of the sentiment of the thing. After that was the season for negative facts. Perhaps when everything was stated they might be able to conjure up what he wanted. He was asked in to have tea twice, for he looked not only pink and dusty, but dry, and one old lady said that years ago she had lost just such a boy as Bealby seemed to be—“Ah! not in the way _you_ have lost him”—and she wept, poor old dear! and was only comforted after she had told the Captain three touching but extremely lengthy and detailed anecdotes of Bealby’s vanished prototype. (Fellow cannot rush away, you know; still all this sort of thing, accumulating, means a confounded lot of delay.) And then there was a deaf old man.... A very, very tiresome deaf old man who said at first he _had_ seen Bealby.... After all the old fellow was deaf.... The sunset found the Captain on a breezy common forty miles away from the Redlake Royal Hotel and by this time he knew that fugitive boys cannot be trusted to follow the lines even of the soundest inductions. This business meant a search. Should he pelt back to Redlake and start again more thoroughly on the morrow? A moment of temptation. If he did he knew she wouldn’t let him go. _No!_ NO! He must make a sweeping movement through the country to the left, trying up and down the roads that, roughly speaking, radiated from Redlake between the twenty-fifth and the thirty-fifth milestone.... It was night and high moonlight when at last the Captain reached Crayminster, that little old town decayed to a village, in the Crays valley. He was hungry, dispirited, quite unsuccessful, and here he resolved to eat and rest for the night. He would have a meal, for by this time he was ravenous, and then go and talk in the bar or the tap about Bealby.