'No,' said Bell, her face a little contracting. After a while she
added, 'There's many a one as has husbands that goes off drinking
without iver saying a word to their wives. My master is none o' that
mak'.'

'Mother,' broke in Sylvia again, 'I'll just go and get t' lantern
out of t' shippen, and go up t' brow, and mebbe to t' ash-field
end.'

'Do, lass,' said her mother. 'I'll get my wraps and go with thee.'

'Thou shall do niver such a thing,' said Sylvia. 'Thou's too frail
to go out i' t' night air such a night as this.'

'Then call Kester up.'

'Not I. I'm noane afraid o' t' dark.'

'But of what thou mayst meet i' t' dark, lass?'

Sylvia shivered all over at the sudden thought, suggested by this
speech of her mother's, that the idea that had flashed into her own
mind of going to look for her father might be an answer to the
invocation to the Powers which she had made not long ago, that she
might indeed meet her dead lover at the ash-field stile; but though
she shivered as this superstitious fancy came into her head, her
heart beat firm and regular; not from darkness nor from the spirits
of the dead was she going to shrink; her great sorrow had taken away
all her girlish nervous fear.