Oh! will God iver forgive me ?' Muttering to herself, breaking her mutterings with sharp cries of pain, Sylvia, with Kester's help, reached widow Dobson's house.

It was no longer a quiet, lonely dwelling.

Several sailors stood about the door, awaiting, in silent anxiety, for the verdict of the doctor, who was even now examining Philip's injuries.

Two or three women stood talking eagerly, in low voices, in the doorway.
But when Sylvia drew near the men fell back; and the women moved aside as though to allow her to pass, all looking upon her with a certain amount of sympathy, but perhaps with rather more of antagonistic wonder as to how she was taking it--she who had been living in ease and comfort while her husband's shelter was little better than a hovel, her husband's daily life a struggle with starvation; for so much of the lodger at widow Dobson's was popularly known; and any distrust of him as a stranger and a tramp was quite forgotten now.
Sylvia felt the hardness of their looks, the hardness of their silence; but it was as nothing to her.

If such things could have touched her at this moment, she would not have stood still right in the midst of their averted hearts, and murmured something to Kester.
He could not hear the words uttered by that hoarse choked voice, until he had stooped down and brought his ear to the level of her mouth.
'We'd better wait for t' doctors to come out,' she said again.