When he left her, she waited, and, creeping back, hid near the mill.

God knows what vague dread was in her brain; but she came back to watch and help.
Old Yare wandered through the great loom rooms of the mill with but one fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,--that above him the man lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than death on him to-morrow.
Up and down, aimlessly, with his stoker's torch in hand, going over the years gone and the years to come, with the dead hatred through all of the pitiless man above him,--with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought of things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,--of the corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in "th' Alabam',"-- of the scow his young master gave him once, the first thing he really owned: he was almost as proud of it as he was of Lois when she was born.

Most of all remembering the good times in his life, he went back to Lois.

It was all good, there, to go back to.

What a little chub she used to be! Remembering, with bitter remorse, how all his life he had meant to try and do better, on her account, but had kept putting off and putting off until now.