s a clam-digger and watched the other boys
bringing in their hauls.

"Twenty years ago I said I'd come, and I'm coming," he went on
repeating.

Derrick Trull was no coward, as boy or man, but he made no effort to
save himself; the slimy water washed him about like a wet rag. He was
alone now, if never before in those twenty years; his world of
beautiful, cultured, graceful words and sights and deeds was not here,
it was utterly gone out; there was no God here, that he thought of; he
was quite alone: so, in sight of this lee coast, the old love in that
life dead years ago roused, and the mean crime dragged on through every
day since gnawed all the manliness and courage out of him.

She would be asleep now, old Phebe Trull,--in the room off the brick
kitchen, her wan limbs curled up under her check nightgown, her pipe and
noggin of tea on the oven-shelf; he could smell the damp, musty odor of
the slop-sink near by. What if he could reach shore? What if he were to
steal up to her bed and waken her?

"It's Derrick, back, mother," he would say. How the old creature would
skirl and cry over her son Derrick!--Derrick! he hated the name. It
belonged to that time of degradation and stinting and foulness.

Doctor Birkenshead lifted himself up. Pish! the old fish-wife had long
since forgotten her scapegrace son,--thought him dead. _He was dead._ He
wondered--and this while every swash of the salt-water brought death
closer up to his lips--if Miss Defourchet had seen "Mother Phebe."
Doubtless she had, and had made a sketch of her to show him;--but no,
she was not a picturesque pauper,--vulgar, simply. The water came up
closer; the cold of it, and the extremity of peril, or, maybe, this old
gnawing at the heart, more virulent than either, soon drew the strength
out of his body: close study and high living had made the joints less
supple than Derrick Trull's: he lay there limp and unable,--his brain
alert, but fickle. It put the watery death out of sight, and brought his
familiar every-day life about him: the dissecting-room; curious cases
that had puzzled him; drawing-rooms, beautiful women; he sang airs from
the operas, sad, broken little snatches, in a deep, mellow voice, finely
trained,--fragments of a litany to the Virgin. Birkenshead's love of
beauty was a hungry monomania; his brain was filled with memories of the
pictures of the Ideal Mother and her Son. One by one they came to him
now, the holy woman-type which for ages