Philip turned away his face, and did not utter a word.

Again deep silence, broken only by some homely sound in the kitchen.
'Mother must not know on it,' said Sylvia, in the same tone in which she had spoken before.
'It's t' worst as can happen to him,' said Philip.

'More likely he'll be transported: maybe he'll be brought in innocent after all.' 'No,' said Sylvia, heavily, as one without hope--as if she were reading some dreadful doom in the tablets of the awful future.
'They'll hang him.

Oh, feyther! feyther!' she choked out, almost stuffing her apron into her mouth to deaden the sound, and catching at Philip's hand, and wringing it with convulsive force, till the pain that he loved was nearly more than he could bear.

No words of his could touch such agony; but irrepressibly, and as he would have done it to a wounded child, he bent over her, and kissed her with a tender, trembling kiss.