‘Kester’s a d—­d fool,’ he growled.

‘He says there’s mebbe but one chance i’ a hundred,’ said Sylvia, pleading, as it were, for Kester; ‘but oh!  Philip, think yo’ there’s just that one chance?’

‘Ay, there’s a chance, sure enough,’ said Philip, in a kind of fierce despair that made him reckless what he said or did.  ’There’s a chance, I suppose, for iverything i’ life as we have not seen with our own eyes as it may not ha’ happened.  Kester may say next as there’s a chance as your father is not dead, because we none on us saw him——­’

‘Hung,’ he was going to have said, but a touch of humanity came back into his stony heart.  Sylvia sent up a little sharp cry at his words.  He longed at the sound to take her in his arms and hush her up, as a mother hushes her weeping child.  But the very longing, having to be repressed, only made him more beside himself with guilt, anxiety, and rage.  They were quite still now.  Sylvia looking sadly down into the bubbling, merry, flowing water:  Philip glaring at her, wishing that the next word were spoken, though it might stab him to the heart.  But she did not speak.

At length, unable to bear it any longer, he said, ’Thou sets a deal o’ store on that man, Sylvie.’

If ‘that man’ had been there at the moment, Philip would have grappled with him, and not let go his hold till one or the other were dead.  Sylvia caught some of the passionate meaning of the gloomy, miserable tone of Philip’s voice as he said these words.  She looked up at him.

‘I thought yo’ knowed that I cared a deal for him.’

There was something so pleading and innocent in her pale, troubled face, so pathetic in her tone, that Philip’s anger, which had been excited against her, as well as against all the rest of the world, melted away into love; and once more he felt that have her for his own he must, at any cost.  He sate down by her, and spoke to her in quite a different manner to that which he had used before, with a ready tact and art which some strange instinct or tempter ’close at his ear’ supplied.

‘Yes, darling, I knew yo’ cared for him.  I’ll not say ill of him that is—­dead—­ay, dead and drowned—­whativer Kester may say—­before now; but if I chose I could tell tales.’

‘No! tell no tales; I’ll not hear them,’ said she, wrenching herself out of Philip’s clasping arm.  ‘They may misca’ him for iver, and I’ll not believe ’em.’

‘I’ll niver miscall one who is dead,’ said Philip; each new unconscious sign of the strength of Sylvia’s love for her former lover only making him the more anxious to convince her that he was dead, only rendering him more keen at deceiving his own conscience by repeating to it the lie that long ere this Kinraid was in all probability dead—­killed by either the chances of war or tempestuous sea; that, even if not, he was as good as dead to her; so that the word ‘dead’ might be used in all honest certainty, as in one of its meanings Kinraid was dead for sure.