check the speed he
longed to use; yet he was always so near behind that her quickened
sense heard his well-known footsteps following, and a mad notion
flashed across her brain that she would go to the wide full river,
and end the hopeless misery she felt enshrouding her. There was a
sure hiding-place from all human reproach and heavy mortal woe
beneath the rushing waters borne landwards by the morning tide.

No one can tell what changed her course; perhaps the thought of her
sucking child; perhaps her mother; perhaps an angel of God; no one
on earth knows, but as she ran along the quay-side she all at once
turned up an entry, and through an open door.

He, following all the time, came into a quiet dark parlour, with a
cloth and tea-things on the table ready for breakfast; the change
from the bright sunny air out of doors to the deep shadow of this
room made him think for the first moment that she had passed on, and
that no one was there, and he stood for an instant baffled, and
hearing no sound but the beating of his own heart; but an
irrepressible sobbing gasp made him look round, and there he saw her
cowered behind the door, her face covered tight up, and sharp
shudders going through her whole frame.

'My love, my darling!' said he, going up to her, and trying to raise
her, and to loosen her hands away from her face. 'I've been too
sudden for thee: it was thoughtless in me; but I have so looked
forward to this time, and seeing thee come along the field, and go
past me, but I should ha' been more tender and careful of thee. Nay!
let me have another look of thy sweet face.'

All this he whispered in the old tones of manoeuvring love, in that
voice she had yearned and hungered to hear in life, and had not
heard, for all her longing, save in her dreams.

She tried to crouch more and more into the corner, into the hidden
shadow--to sink into the ground out of sight.

Once more he spoke, beseeching her to lift up her face, to let him
hear her speak.

But she only moaned.

'Sylvia!' said he, thinking he could change his tactics, and pique
her into speaking, that he would make a pretence of suspicion and
offence.

'Sylvia! one would think you weren't glad to see me back again at
length. I only came in late last night, and my first thought on
wakening was of you; it has been ever since I left you.'

Sylvia took her hands away from her face; it was gray as the face of
death; her awful eyes were passionless in her