He remembered his mother, and how she had loved him; and he was going to a love wiser, tenderer, deeper than hers.
As he thought this, he moved his hands as if to pray; but Sylvia clenched her hold, and he lay still, praying all the same for her, for his child, and for himself.

Then he saw the sky redden with the first flush of dawn; he heard Kester's long-drawn sigh of weariness outside the open door.
He had seen widow Dobson pass through long before to keep the remainder of her watch on the bed in the lean-to, which had been his for many and many a sleepless and tearful night.

Those nights were over--he should never see that poor chamber again, though it was scarce two feet distant.

He began to lose all sense of the comparative duration of time: it seemed as long since kind Sally Dobson had bent over him with soft, lingering look, before going into the humble sleeping-room--as long as it was since his boyhood, when he stood by his mother dreaming of the life that should be his, with the scent of the cowslips tempting him to be off to the woodlands where they grew.

Then there came a rush and an eddying through his brain--his soul trying her wings for the long flight.
Again he was in the present: he heard the waves lapping against the shelving shore once again.
And now his thoughts came back to Sylvia.