the gray shimmer foretelling
the coming dawn over the sea, the black masts and rigging of the
still vessels against the sky; he could see with his wistful, eager
eyes the shape of the windows--the window of the very room in which
his wife and child slept, unheeding of him, the hungry,
broken-hearted outcast. He would go back to his lodging, and softly
lift the latch of the door; still more softly, but never without an
unspoken, grateful prayer, pass by the poor sleeping woman who had
given him a shelter and her share of God's blessing--she who, like
him, knew not the feeling of satisfied hunger; and then he laid him
down on the narrow pallet in the lean-to, and again gave Sylvia
happy lessons in the kitchen at Haytersbank, and the dead were
alive; and Charley Kinraid, the specksioneer, had never come to
trouble the hopeful, gentle peace.

For widow Dobson had never taken Sylvia's advice. The tramp known to
her by the name of Freeman--that in which he received his
pension--lodged with her still, and paid his meagre shilling in
advance, weekly. A shilling was meagre in those hard days of
scarcity. A hungry man might easily eat the produce of a shilling in
a day.

Widow Dobson pleaded this to Sylvia as an excuse for keeping her
lodger on; to a more calculating head it might have seemed a reason
for sending him away.

'Yo' see, missus,' said she, apologetically, to Sylvia, one evening,
as the latter called upon the poor widow before going to fetch
little Bella (it was now too hot for the child to cross the bridge
in the full heat of the summer sun, and Jeremiah would take her up
to her supper instead)--'Yo' see, missus, there's not a many as 'ud
take him in for a shillin' when it goes so little way; or if they
did, they'd take it out on him some other way, an' he's not getten
much else, a reckon. He ca's me granny, but a'm vast mista'en if
he's ten year younger nor me; but he's getten a fine appetite of his
own, choose how young he may be; an' a can see as he could eat a
deal more nor he's getten money to buy, an' it's few as can mak'
victual go farther nor me. Eh, missus, but yo' may trust me a'll
send him off when times is better; but just now it would be sendin'
him to his death; for a ha' plenty and to spare, thanks be to God
an' yo'r bonny face.'

So Sylvia had to be content with the knowledge that the money she
gladly gave to Kester's sister went partly to feed the lodger who
was neither labourer nor neighbour