, missus, if a cannot find i' my heart
t' turn him out till he wants to go hissel'? For a wouldn't like to
vex yo', for Christopher's sake; but a know what it is for t' feel
for friendless folk, an' choose what may come on it, I cannot send
him away.'

'No!' said Sylvia. 'Why should I be vexed? it's no business o' mine.
Only I should send him away if I was yo'. He might go lodge wheere
there was men-folk, who know t' ways o' tramps, and are up to them.'

Into the sunshine went Sylvia. In the cold shadow the miserable
tramp lay sighing. She did not know that she had been so near to him
towards whom her heart was softening, day by day.

CHAPTER XLIV

FIRST WORDS

It was the spring of 1800. Old people yet can tell of the hard
famine of that year. The harvest of the autumn before had failed;
the war and the corn laws had brought the price of corn up to a
famine rate; and much of what came into the market was unsound, and
consequently unfit for food, yet hungry creatures bought it eagerly,
and tried to cheat disease by mixing the damp, sweet, clammy flour
with rice or potato meal. Rich families denied themselves pastry and
all unnecessary and luxurious uses of wheat in any shape; the duty
on hair-powder was increased; and all these palliatives were but as
drops in the ocean of the great want of the people.

Philip, in spite of himself, recovered and grew stronger; and as he
grew stronger hunger took the place of loathing dislike to food. But
his money was all spent; and what was his poor pension of sixpence a
day in that terrible year of famine? Many a summer's night he walked
for hours and hours round the house which once was his, which might
be his now, with all its homely, blessed comforts, could he but go
and assert his right to it. But to go with authority, and in his
poor, maimed guise assert that right, he had need be other than
Philip Hepburn. So he stood in the old shelter of the steep, crooked
lane opening on to the hill out of the market-place, and watched the
soft fading of the summer's eve into night; the closing of the once
familiar shop; the exit of good, comfortable William Coulson, going
to his own home, his own wife, his comfortable, plentiful supper.
Then Philip--there were no police in those days, and scarcely an old
watchman in that primitive little town--would go round on the shady
sides of streets, and, quickly glancing about him, cross the bridge,
looking on the quiet, rippling stream,