By slow degrees Hester was learning to love the woman, whose position as Philip's wife she would have envied so keenly had she not been so truly good and pious.

But Sylvia seemed as though she had given Hester her whole affection all at once.

Hester could not understand this, while she was touched and melted by the trust it implied.

For one thing Sylvia remembered and regretted--her harsh treatment of Hester the rainy, stormy night on which the latter had come to Haytersbank to seek her and her mother, and bring them into Monkshaven to see the imprisoned father and husband.

Sylvia had been struck with Hester's patient endurance of her rudeness, a rudeness which she was conscious that she herself should have immediately and vehemently resented.