She did not speak; she did not even tremble now; she set her teeth together, and, holding tight by Kester, she urged him on; but when they came to the end of the bridge, she seemed uncertain which way to turn.

‘This way,’ said Kester.  ‘He’s been lodgin’ wi’ Sally this nine week, an’ niver a one about t’ place as knowed him; he’s been i’ t’ wars an’ getten his face brunt.’

‘And he was short o’ food,’ moaned Sylvia, ’and we had plenty, and I tried to make yo’r sister turn him out, and send him away.  Oh! will God iver forgive me?’

Muttering to herself, breaking her mutterings with sharp cries of pain, Sylvia, with Kester’s help, reached widow Dobson’s house.  It was no longer a quiet, lonely dwelling.  Several sailors stood about the door, awaiting, in silent anxiety, for the verdict of the doctor, who was even now examining Philip’s injuries.  Two or three women stood talking eagerly, in low voices, in the doorway.

But when Sylvia drew near the men fell back; and the women moved aside as though to allow her to pass, all looking upon her with a certain amount of sympathy, but perhaps with rather more of antagonistic wonder as to how she was taking it—­she who had been living in ease and comfort while her husband’s shelter was little better than a hovel, her husband’s daily life a struggle with starvation; for so much of the lodger at widow Dobson’s was popularly known; and any distrust of him as a stranger and a tramp was quite forgotten now.

Sylvia felt the hardness of their looks, the hardness of their silence; but it was as nothing to her.  If such things could have touched her at this moment, she would not have stood still right in the midst of their averted hearts, and murmured something to Kester.  He could not hear the words uttered by that hoarse choked voice, until he had stooped down and brought his ear to the level of her mouth.

‘We’d better wait for t’ doctors to come out,’ she said again.  She stood by the door, shivering all over, almost facing the people in the road, but with her face turned a little to the right, so that they thought she was looking at the pathway on the cliff-side, a hundred yards or so distant, below which the hungry waves still lashed themselves into high ascending spray; while nearer to the cottage, where their force was broken by the bar at the entrance to the river, they came softly lapping up the shelving shore.

Sylvia saw nothing of all this, though it was straight before her eyes.  She only saw a blurred mist; she heard no sound of waters, though it filled the ears of those around.  Instead she heard low whispers pronouncing Philip’s earthly doom.

For the doctors were both agreed; his internal injury was of a mortal kind, although, as the spine was severely injured above the seat of the fatal bruise, he had no pain in the lower half of his body.

They had spoken in so low a tone that John Foster, standing only a foot or so away, had not been able to hear their words.  But Sylvia heard each syllable there where she stood outside, shivering all over in the sultry summer evening.  She turned round to Kester.