Adam Fairbrother was at the dinner table, enveloped in tobacco clouds. His wife, Ruth, had drawn her chair aside that she might knit. Stephen Orry entered slowly with little Sunlocks by the hand.
"This is the person, your Excellency," said the footman.
"Come in, Stephen Orry," said the Governor.
Stephen Orry's face softened at that word of welcome. The footman's dropped and he disappeared.
Then Stephen told his errand. "I shall come to have give you something," he said, trying to speak in English.
Adam's wife raised her eyes and glanced over him. Adam himself laid down his pipe and held out his hand towards Sunlocks. But Stephen held the child back a moment and spoke again.
"It's all I shall have got to give," he said.
"What is it?" said Adam.
"The child," said Stephen, and passed little Sunlocks to Adam's outstretched hand.
At that Adam's wife dropped her knitting to her lap, but Stephen, seeing nothing of the amazement written in her face, went on in his broken words to tell them all—of his wife's life, her death, his own sore temptation, and the voice out of heaven that had called to him. And then with a moistened eye and a glance at Sunlocks, and in a lowered tone as if fearing the child might hear, he spoke of what he meant to do now—of how he would go back to the herrings, and maybe to sea, or perhaps down into the mines, but never again to Port-y-Vullin. And, because a lone man was no company for a child, and could not take a little one with him if he would, he had come to it at last that he must needs part with little Sunlocks, lending him, or maybe giving him, to someone he could trust.