Driven to Bay, Volume I by Florence Marryat

Few people who had only seen Vernon Blythe when in the pursuit of the manly exercises in which most sailors delight, and in which he especially excelled, would have recognised him now as he lay back in his chair, with his delicate profile clearly limned against the evening sky, and a look of abject pain in the eyes that watched the curling wreaths of smoke that ascended from his pipe. There were two distinct sides to this young man's character, as there are to that of most of us. To the outside world, and in the pursuit of his profession, he was known as one of the most daring, courageous, and undaunted of natures, -- a man who did not know what it was to fear danger, to dread a risk, or to leave an insult unavenged. He was brave, imprudent, and hot-headed, but strictly generous and honourable. With his mother, however, and in the sanctity of home, he was a different creature. There his heart rose uppermost, and he became less guarded in his looks and speech. There, as it were, he thought less of his manhood and men friends, and more of himself and his private feelings. And so the secret, which he believed to be entirely his own property, had slipped from him unawares, and become his mother's. But who can hide a beloved child's suffering from the eyes of his mother? And Vernon felt glad now that it was so.

‘Do you remember,' he began presently, and in a lower voice than usual, -- ‘do you remember, mother, the time after my second voyage, when I had had that touch of Gold Coast fever, and you sent me up to Uncle Vernon's in Selkirk for three months to recruit?'