Sylvia’s terrible stare continued:  he put his advice into action, and gently tried to loosen her clasp, and tender hold.  This she resisted; laying her cheek against her poor mother’s unconscious face.

‘Where is Hepburn?’ said he.  ‘He ought to be here!’

Phoebe looked at Nancy, Nancy at Phoebe.  It was the latter who replied,

‘He’s neither i’ t’ house nor i’ t’ shop.  A seed him go past t’ kitchen window better nor an hour ago; but neither William Coulson or Hester Rose knows where he’s gone to.

Dr Morgan’s lips were puckered up into a whistle, but he made no sound.

‘Give me baby!’ he said, suddenly.  Nancy had taken her up off the bed where she had been sitting, encircled by her mother’s arm.  The nursemaid gave her to the doctor.  He watched the mother’s eye, it followed her child, and he was rejoiced.  He gave a little pinch to the baby’s soft flesh, and she cried out piteously; again the same action, the same result.  Sylvia laid her mother down, and stretched out her arms for her child, hushing it, and moaning over it.

‘So far so good!’ said Dr Morgan to himself.  ’But where is the husband?  He ought to be here.’  He went down-stairs to make inquiry for Philip; that poor young creature, about whose health he had never felt thoroughly satisfied since the fever after her confinement, was in an anxious condition, and with an inevitable shock awaiting her.  Her husband ought to be with her, and supporting her to bear it.

Dr Morgan went into the shop.  Hester alone was there.  Coulson had gone to his comfortable dinner at his well-ordered house, with his common-place wife.  If he had felt anxious about Philip’s looks and strange disappearance, he had also managed to account for them in some indifferent way.

Hester was alone with the shop-boy; few people came in during the universal Monkshaven dinner-hour.  She was resting her head on her hand, and puzzled and distressed about many things—­all that was implied by the proceedings of the evening before between Philip and Sylvia; and that was confirmed by Philip’s miserable looks and strange abstracted ways to-day.  Oh! how easy Hester would have found it to make him happy! not merely how easy, but what happiness it would have been to her to merge her every wish into the one great object of fulfiling his will.  To her, an on-looker, the course of married life, which should lead to perfect happiness, seemed to plain!  Alas! it is often so! and the resisting forces which make all such harmony and delight impossible are not recognized by the bystanders, hardly by the actors.  But if these resisting forces are only superficial, or constitutional, they are but the necessary discipline here, and do not radically affect the love which will make all things right in heaven.

Some glimmering of this latter comforting truth shed its light on Hester’s troubled thoughts from time to time.  But again, how easy would it have been to her to tread the maze that led to Philip’s happiness; and how difficult it seemed to the wife he had chosen!