She was too much a child, too entirely unaccustomed to any independence of action, to do anything but leave herself in his hands.  Her very confession, made to him the day before, when she sought his counsel, seemed to place her at his disposal.  Otherwise, she had had notions of the possibility of a free country life once more—­how provided for and arranged she hardly knew; but Haytersbank was to let, and Kester disengaged, and it had just seemed possible that she might have to return to her early home, and to her old life.  She knew that it would take much money to stock the farm again, and that her hands were tied from much useful activity by the love and care she owed to her baby.  But still, somehow, she hoped and she fancied, till Jeremiah Foster’s measured words and carefully-arranged plan made her silently relinquish her green, breezy vision.

Hester, too, had her own private rebellion—­hushed into submission by her gentle piety.  If Sylvia had been able to make Philip happy, Hester could have felt lovingly and almost gratefully towards her; but Sylvia had failed in this.

Philip had been made unhappy, and was driven forth a wanderer into the wide world—­never to come back!  And his last words to Hester, the postscript of his letter, containing the very pith of it, was to ask her to take charge and care of the wife whose want of love towards him had uprooted him from the place where he was valued and honoured.

It cost Hester many a struggle and many a self-reproach before she could make herself feel what she saw all along—­that in everything Philip treated her like a sister.  But even a sister might well be indignant if she saw her brother’s love disregarded and slighted, and his life embittered by the thoughtless conduct of a wife!  Still Hester fought against herself, and for Philip’s sake she sought to see the good in Sylvia, and she strove to love her as well as to take care of her.

With the baby, of course, the case was different.  Without thought or struggle, or reason, every one loved the little girl.  Coulson and his buxom wife, who were childless, were never weary of making much of her.  Hester’s happiest hours were spent with that little child.  Jeremiah Foster almost looked upon her as his own from the day when she honoured him by yielding to the temptation of the chain and seal, and coming to his knee; not a customer to the shop but knew the smiling child’s sad history, and many a country-woman would save a rosy-cheeked apple from out her store that autumn to bring it on next market-day for ’Philip Hepburn’s baby, as had lost its father, bless it.’

Even stern Alice Rose was graciously inclined towards the little Bella; and though her idea of the number of the elect was growing narrower and narrower every day, she would have been loth to exclude the innocent little child, that stroked her wrinkled cheeks so softly every night in return for her blessing, from the few that should be saved.  Nay, for the child’s sake, she relented towards the mother; and strove to have Sylvia rescued from the many castaways with fervent prayer, or, as she phrased it, ’wrestling with the Lord’.