This was all very unintelligible to Hester, and she would dearly have liked to question Sylvia; but Sylvia sate a little apart, with Bella on her knee, her cheek resting on her child’s golden curls, and her eyes fixed and almost trance-like, as if she were seeing things not present.

So Hester had to be content with asking her mother as many elucidatory questions as she could; and after all did not gain a very clear idea of what had really been said by Mrs. Kinraid, as her mother was more full of the apparent injustice of Philip’s being allowed the privilege of treading on holy ground—­if, indeed, that holy ground existed on this side heaven, which she was inclined to dispute—­than to confine herself to the repetition of words, or narration of facts.

Suddenly Sylvia roused herself to a sense of Hester’s deep interest and balked inquiries, and she went over the ground rapidly.

’Yo’r mother says right—­she is his wife.  And he’s away fighting; and got too near t’ French as was shooting and firing all round him; and just then, according to her story, Philip saw him, and went straight into t’ midst o’ t’ shots, and fetched him out o’ danger.  That’s what she says, and upholds.’

‘And why should it not be?’ asked Hester, her cheek flushing.

But Sylvia only shook her head, and said,

’I cannot tell.  It may be so.  But they’d little cause to be friends, and it seems all so strange—­Philip a soldier, and them meeting theere after all!’

Hester laid the story of Philip’s bravery to her heart—­she fully believed in it.  Sylvia pondered it more deeply still; the causes for her disbelief, or, at any rate, for her wonder, were unknown to Hester!  Many a time she sank to sleep with the picture of the event narrated by Mrs. Kinraid as present to her mind as her imagination or experience could make it:  first one figure prominent, then another.  Many a morning she wakened up, her heart beating wildly, why, she knew not, till she shuddered at the remembrance of the scenes that had passed in her dreams:  scenes that might be acted in reality that very day; for Philip might come back, and then?

And where was Philip all this time, these many weeks, these heavily passing months?

CHAPTER XLI

THE BEDESMAN OF ST SEPULCHRE

Philip lay long ill on board the hospital ship.  If his heart had been light, he might have rallied sooner; but he was so depressed he did not care to live.  His shattered jaw-bone, his burnt and blackened face, his many injuries of body, were torture to both his physical frame, and his sick, weary heart.  No more chance for him, if indeed there ever had been any, of returning gay and gallant, and thus regaining his wife’s love.  This had been his poor, foolish vision in the first hour of his enlistment; and the vain dream had recurred more than once in the feverish stage of excitement which the new scenes into which he had been hurried as a recruit had called forth.  But that was all over now.  He knew that it was the most unlikely thing in the world to have come to pass; and yet those were happy days when he could think of it as barely possible.  Now all he could look forward to was disfigurement, feebleness, and the bare pittance that keeps pensioners from absolute want.