’Philip would have been in to his tea by now, I reckon, if he’d been coming.’

William looked up suddenly at Hester; her mother carefully turned her head another way.  But she answered quite quietly—­

‘He’ll be gone to his aunt’s at Haytersbank.  I met him at t’ top o’ t’ Brow, with his cousin and Molly Corney.’

‘He’s a deal there,’ said William.

‘Yes,’ said Hester.  ’It’s likely; him and his aunt come from Carlisle-way, and must needs cling together in these strange parts.’

‘I saw him at the burying of yon Darley,’ said William.

‘It were a vast o’ people went past th’ entry end,’ said Alice.  ’It were a’most like election time; I were just come back fra’ meeting when they were all going up th’ church steps.  I met yon sailor as, they say, used violence and did murder; he looked like a ghost, though whether it were his bodily wounds, or the sense of his sins stirring within him, it’s not for me to say.  And by t’ time I was back here and settled to my Bible, t’ folk were returning, and it were tramp, tramp, past th’ entry end for better nor a quarter of an hour.’

‘They say Kinraid has getten slugs and gun-shot in his side,’ said Hester.

’He’s niver one Charley Kinraid, for sure, as I knowed at Newcastle,’ said William Coulson, roused to sudden and energetic curiosity.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Hester; ’they call him just Kinraid; and Betsy Darley says he’s t’ most daring specksioneer of all that go off this coast to t’ Greenland seas.  But he’s been in Newcastle, for I mind me she said her poor brother met with him there.’

‘How didst thee come to know him?’ inquired Alice.

‘I cannot abide him if it is Charley,’ said William.  ’He kept company with my poor sister as is dead for better nor two year, and then he left off coming to see her and went wi’ another girl, and it just broke her heart.’

‘He don’t look now as if he iver could play at that game again,’ said Alice; ‘he has had a warning fra’ the Lord.  Whether it be a call no one can tell.  But to my eyne he looks as if he had been called, and was going.’

‘Then he’ll meet my sister,’ said William, solemnly; ’and I hope the Lord will make it clear to him, then, how he killed her, as sure as he shot down yon sailors; an’ if there’s a gnashing o’ teeth for murder i’ that other place, I reckon he’ll have his share on’t.  He’s a bad man yon.’

’Betsy said he were such a friend to her brother as niver was; and he’s sent her word and promised to go and see her, first place he goes out to.

But William only shook his head, and repeated his last words,—­

‘He’s a bad man, he is.’

When Philip came home that Sunday night, he found only Alice up to receive him.  The usual bedtime in the household was nine o’clock, and it was but ten minutes past the hour; but Alice looked displeased and stern.

‘Thee art late, lad,’ said she, shortly.