ugh they would have used force to separate her
from their prisoner. Philip took her hand, and softly led her back
to her weeping mother.

For some time nothing was to be heard in the little farmhouse
kitchen but the sobbing and wailing of the women. Philip stood by
silent, thinking, as well as he could, for his keen sympathy with
their grief, what had best be done next. Kester, after some growls
at Sylvia for having held back the uplifted arm which he thought
might have saved Daniel by a well-considered blow on his captors as
they entered the house, went back into his shippen--his cell for
meditation and consolation, where he might hope to soothe himself
before going out to his afternoon's work; labour which his master
had planned for him that very morning, with a strange foresight, as
Kester thought, for the job was one which would take him two or
three days without needing any further directions than those he had
received, and by the end of that time he thought that his master
would be at liberty again. So he--so they all thought in their
ignorance and inexperience.

Although Daniel himself was unreasoning, hasty, impulsive--in a
word, often thinking and acting very foolishly--yet, somehow, either
from some quality in his character, or from the loyalty of nature in
those with whom he had to deal in his every-day life, he had made
his place and position clear as the arbiter and law-giver of his
household. On his decision, as that of husband, father, master,
perhaps superior natures waited. So now that he was gone and had
left them in such strange new circumstances so suddenly, it seemed
as though neither Bell nor Sylvia knew exactly what to do when their
grief was spent, so much had every household action and plan been
regulated by the thought of him. Meanwhile Philip had slowly been
arriving at the conclusion that he was more wanted at Monkshaven to
look after Daniel's interests, to learn what were the legal
probabilities in consequence of the old man's arrest, and to arrange
for his family accordingly, than standing still and silent in the
Haytersbank kitchen, too full of fellow-feeling and heavy foreboding
to comfort, awkwardly unsympathetic in appearance from the very
aching of his heart.

So when his aunt, with instinctive sense of regularity and
propriety, began to put away the scarcely tasted dinner, and Sylvia,
blinded with crying, and convulsively sobbing, was yet trying to
help her mother, Philip took hi