'I don't think Hester Rose has any thought of matrimony.'

'To be sure not; it is for thee, or for William Coulson, to make her
think. She, may-be, remembers enough of her mother's life with her
father to make her slow to think on such things. But it's in her to
think on matrimony; it's in all of us.'

'Alice's husband was dead before I knew her,' said Philip, rather
evading the main subject.

'It was a mercy when he were taken. A mercy to them who were left, I
mean. Alice was a bonny young woman, with a smile for everybody,
when he wed her--a smile for every one except our John, who never
could do enough to try and win one from her. But, no! she would have
none of him, but set her heart on Jack Rose, a sailor in a
whale-ship. And so they were married at last, though all her own
folks were against it. And he was a profligate sinner, and went
after other women, and drank, and beat her. She turned as stiff and
as grey as thou seest her now within a year of Hester's birth. I
believe they'd have perished for want and cold many a time if it had
not been for John. If she ever guessed where the money came from, it
must have hurt her pride above a bit, for she was always a proud
woman. But mother's love is stronger than pride.'

Philip fell to thinking; a generation ago something of the same kind
had been going on as that which he was now living through, quick
with hopes and fears. A girl beloved by two--nay, those two so
identical in occupation as he and Kinraid were--Rose identical even
in character with what he knew of the specksioneer; a girl choosing
the wrong lover, and suffering and soured all her life in
consequence of her youth's mistake; was that to be Sylvia's
lot?--or, rather, was she not saved from it by the event of the
impressment, and by the course of silence he himself had resolved
upon? Then he went on to wonder if the lives of one generation were
but a repetition of the lives of those who had gone before, with no
variation but from the internal cause that some had greater capacity
for suffering than others. Would those very circumstances which made
the interest of his life now, return, in due cycle, when he was dead
and Sylvia was forgotten?

Perplexed thoughts of this and a similar kind kept returning into
Philip's mind whenever he had leisure to give himself up to
consideration of anything but the immediate throng of business. And
every time he dwelt on this complication and succession of similar
e