His left hand is raised with the palm open towards a girl seated on a low chair by a bed holding a sick older figure. With her right hand she holds the hand of the bed-ridden patient, probably intended to be her parent. The artist has used the language of pose and gesture to convey a narrative. The sailor holds out his hatful of money towards the girl, the implication probably being that he went to sea to earn enough money for them to marry. He has now returned to show her that he has means to provide for her but, in a movement mimicking his, the girl's left arm is stretched out towards him with her palm held flat as a gesture of rejection. Despite her earlier promise, she is no longer free because of her duty to her sick parent. The painting also shows the emotional intensity of the moment in the exchange of glances. The far end of the room is in shadow but a shaft of golden light through the window, falls on the girl and lightens the face of the boy. This underpins the moral message: even among the poor a sense of virtuous duty can outweigh desire. In this painting Wheatley is concerned with the psychological relationship between the subjects as well as domestic detail and costume. The work marks a shift from a Hogarthian concentration of genre in the cause of harsh moral social satire towards a gentler, sweeter style. Wheatley implies that a society which was uncomfortably aware of the sufferings of the rural poor, brought about by the agricultural revolution, sought compensating reassurance in depictions of an idealised pastoral life.