And then suddenly it came home to us both that for all his cheery face he had never moved more than his arms, and that his leg was resting on the opposite seat of the chaise.

“Oh, Anson, Anson!” she cried.

“Tut, ’tis but the bone of my leg,” said he, taking his knee between his hands and lifting it round.  “I got it broke in the Bay, but the surgeon has fished it and spliced it, though it’s a bit crank yet.  Why, bless her kindly heart, if I haven’t turned her from pink to white.  You can see for yourself that it’s nothing.”

He sprang out as he spoke, and with one leg and a staff he hopped swiftly up the path, and under the laurel-bordered motto, and so over his own threshold for the first time for five years.  When the post-boy and I had carried up the sea-chest and the two canvas bags, there he was sitting in his armchair by the window in his old weather-stained blue coat.  My mother was weeping over his poor leg, and he patting her hair with one brown hand.  His other he threw round my waist, and drew me to the side of his chair.

“Now that we have peace, I can lie up and refit until King George needs me again,” said he. “’Twas a carronade that came adrift in the Bay when it was blowing a top-gallant breeze with a beam sea.  Ere we could make it fast it had me jammed against the mast.  Well, well,” he added, looking round at the walls of the room, “here are all my old curios, the same as ever:  the narwhal’s horn from the Arctic, and the blowfish from the Moluccas, and the paddles from Fiji, and the picture of the Ca Ira with Lord Hotham in chase.  And here you are, Mary, and you also, Roddy, and good luck to the carronade which has sent me into so snug a harbour without fear of sailing orders.”

My mother had his long pipe and his tobacco all ready for him, so that he was able now to light it and to sit looking from one of us to the other and then back again, as if he could never see enough of us.  Young as I was, I could still understand that this was the moment which he had thought of during many a lonely watch, and that the expectation of it had cheered his heart in many a dark hour.  Sometimes he would touch one of us with his hand, and sometimes the other, and so he sat, with his soul too satiated for words, whilst the shadows gathered in the little room and the lights of the inn windows glimmered through the gloom.  And then, after my mother had lit our own lamp, she slipped suddenly down upon her knees, and he got one knee to the ground also, so that, hand-in-hand, they joined their thanks to Heaven for manifold mercies.  When I look back at my parents as they were in those days, it is at that very moment that I can picture them most clearly:  her sweet face with the wet shining upon her cheeks, and his blue eyes upturned to the smoke-blackened ceiling.  I remember that he swayed his reeking pipe in the earnestness of his prayer, so that I was half tears and half smiles as I watched him.