The Corporal ended his strange story as if after all it didn't much matter. He was quite impersonal, but Melia sat beside him shivering at the look in his eyes. Never before had the veil been torn aside in this way. She was a dull soul, fettered heavily by her limitations, but sitting there in the growing dusk it came on her almost with horror that in all those long years it was the first peep she had had behind the scenes of his mind. She hadn't realized the kind of man he was. More than once she had cast it in his face that he was an idle shack-about. Somehow, there had been nothing to give her the key to him; and now, miraculously as it seemed, it had come to her, it was too late.
She had the key to him now. But the sands were running out in fate's hour glass. She couldn't bear to look at his thin gray face as the light fell on it, nor at his strange eyes fixed on the padlocked gate of the cottage opposite. Of a sudden the watch slipped from her shaking hands, and fell lightly in a little brake of thistles by the end of the bench on which they sat.
Cautiously and carefully he picked it out. "Take care on it, Mother," he said softly as he put it again in her hands. "I wish we'd a little boy as could have had it. However, we've not. There was once a George Hollis who was an artist; I showed you that picture of his, "The Glade above Corfield," the other day; Jim said it was a good one. John Torrington one time was his pupil. Don't suppose he was any relation but it's the same name."
Melia put the watch in the pretty leather bag he had insisted on buying for her. And then she said with a horrible clutch in her throat: "Bill, promise! You'll come back ... won't you?"
He sighed softly like a child who is very tired. "I'll do what I can, Mother." The voice was gentleness itself. "I can't do more."
She didn't know ... she didn't realize ... what ... she ... was....
They sat hand in hand on the bench by the duck pond until the shadows began to lengthen along the valley of the Sharrow. For quite a long time they didn't speak, but at last their reverie was broken by the sight of a dusty figure with a sack on its back shambling along the road towards them. It was the village postman.