There’s Molly frying flapjacks now, and flapjacks won’t wait for no man, you know, no more than time and tide, else I should have talked till midnight, very like, to tell the time we made on that trip home, and how green the harbor looked a sailing up, and of Molly and the baby coming down to meet me in a little boat that danced about (for we cast a little down the channel), and how she climbed up a laughing and a crying all to once, about my neck, and how the boy had grown, and how when he ran about the deck (the little shaver had his first pair of boots on that very afternoon) I bethought me of the other time, and of Molly’s words, and of the lad we’d left behind us in the purple days.

Just as we were hauling up, I says to my wife:  “Who’s that old lady setting there upon the lumber, with a gray bunnet, and a gray ribbon on her cap?”

For there was an old lady there, and I saw the sun all about her, and all on the blazing yellow boards, and I grew a little dazed and dazzled.

“I don’t know,” said Molly, catching onto me a little close.  “She comes there every day.  They say she sits and watches for her lad as ran away.”

So then I seemed to know, as well as ever I knew afterwards, who it was.  And I thought of the dog.  And the green rocking-chair.  And the book that Whitmarsh wadded his old gun with.  And the front-door, with the boy a walking in.

So we three went up the wharf,—­Molly and the baby and me,—­and sat down beside her on the yellow boards.  I can’t remember rightly what I said, but I remember her sitting silent in the sunshine till I had told her all there was to tell.

“Don’t cry!” says Molly, when I got through,—­which it was the more surprising of Molly, considering as she was doing the crying all to herself.  The old lady never cried, you see.  She sat with her eyes wide open under her gray bunnet, and her lips a moving.  After a while I made it out what it was she said:  “The only son—­of his mother—­and she—­”

By and by she gets up, and goes her ways, and Molly and I walk home together, with our little boy between us.

The End.