’Sylvia! one would think you weren’t glad to see me back again at length.  I only came in late last night, and my first thought on wakening was of you; it has been ever since I left you.’

Sylvia took her hands away from her face; it was gray as the face of death; her awful eyes were passionless in her despair.

‘Where have yo’ been?’ she asked, in slow, hoarse tones, as if her voice were half strangled within her.

‘Been!’ said he, a red light coming into his eyes, as he bent his looks upon her; now, indeed, a true and not an assumed suspicion entering his mind.

‘Been!’ he repeated; then, coming a step nearer to her, and taking her hand, not tenderly this time, but with a resolution to be satisfied.

’Did not your cousin—­Hepburn, I mean—­did not he tell you?—­he saw the press-gang seize me,—­I gave him a message to you—­I bade you keep true to me as I would be to you.’

Between every clause of this speech he paused and gasped for her answer; but none came.  Her eyes dilated and held his steady gaze prisoner as with a magical charm—­neither could look away from the other’s wild, searching gaze.  When he had ended, she was silent for a moment, then she cried out, shrill and fierce,—­

‘Philip!’ No answer.

Wilder and shriller still, ‘Philip!’ she cried.

He was in the distant ware-room completing the last night’s work before the regular shop hours began; before breakfast, also, that his wife might not find him waiting and impatient.

He heard her cry; it cut through doors, and still air, and great bales of woollen stuff; he thought that she had hurt herself, that her mother was worse, that her baby was ill, and he hastened to the spot whence the cry proceeded.

On opening the door that separated the shop from the sitting-room, he saw the back of a naval officer, and his wife on the ground, huddled up in a heap; when she perceived him come in, she dragged herself up by means of a chair, groping like a blind person, and came and stood facing him.

The officer turned fiercely round, and would have come towards Philip, who was so bewildered by the scene that even yet he did not understand who the stranger was, did not perceive for an instant that he saw the realization of his greatest dread.

But Sylvia laid her hand on Kinraid’s arm, and assumed to herself the right of speech.  Philip did not know her voice, it was so changed.

‘Philip,’ she said, ’this is Kinraid come back again to wed me.  He is alive; he has niver been dead, only taken by t’ press-gang.  And he says yo’ saw it, and knew it all t’ time.  Speak, was it so?’

Philip knew not what to say, whither to turn, under what refuge of words or acts to shelter.

Sylvia’s influence was keeping Kinraid silent, but he was rapidly passing beyond it.

‘Speak!’ he cried, loosening himself from Sylvia’s light grasp, and coming towards Philip, with a threatening gesture.  ’Did I not bid you tell her how it was?  Did I not bid you say how I would be faithful to her, and she was to be faithful to me?  Oh! you damned scoundrel! have you kept it from her all that time, and let her think me dead, or false?  Take that!’