Yet, for all his pity, he had now resolved never to soothe her with the knowledge of what he knew, nor to deliver the message sent by her false lover.

He felt like a mother withholding something injurious from the foolish wish of her plaining child.
But he went away without breathing a word of his good fortune in business.

The telling of such kind of good fortune seemed out of place this night, when the thought of death and the loss of friends seemed to brood over the household, and cast its shadow there, obscuring for the time all worldly things.
And so the great piece of news came out in the ordinary course of gossip, told by some Monkshaven friend to Robson the next market day.

For months Philip had been looking forward to the sensation which the intelligence would produce in the farm household, as a preliminary to laying his good fortune at Sylvia's feet.

And they heard of it, and he away, and all chance of his making use of it in the manner he had intended vanished for the present.
Daniel was always curious after other people's affairs, and now was more than ever bent on collecting scraps of news which might possibly interest Sylvia, and rouse her out of the state of indifference as to everything into which she had fallen.