uch that it was a positive
terror to think of meeting him again. She felt as though, if she but
caught a sight of him, the glitter of his uniform, or heard his
well-known voice in only a distant syllable of talk, her heart would
stop, and she should die from very fright of what would come next.
Or rather so she felt, and so she thought before she took her baby
in her arms, as Nancy gave it to her after putting on its
out-of-door attire.

With it in her arms she was protected, and the whole current of her
thoughts was changed. The infant was wailing and suffering with its
teething, and the mother's heart was so occupied in soothing and
consoling her moaning child, that the dangerous quay-side and the
bridge were passed almost before she was aware; nor did she notice
the eager curiosity and respectful attention of those she met who
recognized her even through the heavy veil which formed part of the
draping mourning provided for her by Hester and Coulson, in the
first unconscious days after her mother's death.

Though public opinion as yet reserved its verdict upon Philip's
disappearance--warned possibly by Kinraid's story against hasty
decisions and judgments in such times as those of war and general
disturbance--yet every one agreed that no more pitiful fate could
have befallen Philip's wife.

Marked out by her striking beauty as an object of admiring interest
even in those days when she sate in girlhood's smiling peace by her
mother at the Market Cross--her father had lost his life in a
popular cause, and ignominious as the manner of his death might be,
he was looked upon as a martyr to his zeal in avenging the wrongs of
his townsmen; Sylvia had married amongst them too, and her quiet
daily life was well known to them; and now her husband had been
carried off from her side just on the very day when she needed his
comfort most.

For the general opinion was that Philip had been 'carried off'--in
seaport towns such occurrences were not uncommon in those
days--either by land-crimps or water-crimps.

So Sylvia was treated with silent reverence, as one sorely
afflicted, by all the unheeded people she met in her faltering walk
to Jeremiah Foster's.

She had calculated her time so as to fall in with him at his dinner
hour, even though it obliged her to go to his own house rather than
to the bank where he and his brother spent all the business hours of
the day.

Sylvia was so nearly exhausted by the length of her walk