Philip was silent, thinking what more he could urge.

‘Yo’d better be off,’ said Sylvia, in a minute or two.  ‘Yo’ and me has got wrong, and it’ll take a night’s sleep to set us right.  Yo’ve said all yo’ can for him; and perhaps it’s not yo’ as is to blame, but yo’r nature.  But I’m put out wi’ thee, and want thee out o’ my sight for awhile.’

One or two more speeches of this kind convinced him that it would be wise in him to take her at her word.  He went back to Simpson, and found him, though still alive, past the understanding of any words of human forgiveness.  Philip had almost wished he had not troubled or irritated Sylvia by urging the dying man’s request:  the performance of this duty seemed now to have been such a useless office.

After all, the performance of a duty is never a useless office, though we may not see the consequences, or they may be quite different to what we expected or calculated on.  In the pause of active work, when daylight was done, and the evening shades came on, Sylvia had time to think; and her heart grew sad and soft, in comparison to what it had been when Philip’s urgency had called out all her angry opposition.  She thought of her father—­his sharp passions, his frequent forgiveness, or rather his forgetfulness that he had even been injured.  All Sylvia’s persistent or enduring qualities were derived from her mother, her impulses from her father.  It was her dead father whose example filled her mind this evening in the soft and tender twilight.  She did not say to herself that she would go and tell Simpson that she forgave him; but she thought that if Philip asked her again that she should do so.

But when she saw Philip again he told her that Simpson was dead; and passed on from what he had reason to think would be an unpleasant subject to her.  Thus he never learnt how her conduct might have been more gentle and relenting than her words—­words which came up into his memory at a future time, with full measure of miserable significance.

In general, Sylvia was gentle and good enough; but Philip wanted her to be shy and tender with him, and this she was not.  She spoke to him, her pretty eyes looking straight and composedly at him.  She consulted him like the family friend that he was:  she met him quietly in all the arrangements for the time of their marriage, which she looked upon more as a change of home, as the leaving of Haytersbank, as it would affect her mother, than in any more directly personal way.  Philip was beginning to feel, though not as yet to acknowledge, that the fruit he had so inordinately longed for was but of the nature of an apple of Sodom.