Coulson had gone to his comfortable dinner at his well-ordered house, with his common-place wife.

If he had felt anxious about Philip's looks and strange disappearance, he had also managed to account for them in some indifferent way.
Hester was alone with the shop-boy; few people came in during the universal Monkshaven dinner-hour.

She was resting her head on her hand, and puzzled and distressed about many things--all that was implied by the proceedings of the evening before between Philip and Sylvia; and that was confirmed by Philip's miserable looks and strange abstracted ways to-day.

Oh! how easy Hester would have found it to make him happy! not merely how easy, but what happiness it would have been to her to merge her every wish into the one great object of fulfiling his will.

To her, an on-looker, the course of married life, which should lead to perfect happiness, seemed to plain! Alas! it is often so! and the resisting forces which make all such harmony and delight impossible are not recognized by the bystanders, hardly by the actors.