During this discursive address Silas had continued motionless in his previous attitude, leaning his elbows on his knees, and pressing his hands against his head. Mr. Macey, not doubting that he had been listened to, paused, in the expectation of some appreciatory reply, but Marner remained silent. He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched: he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.

“Come, Master Marner, have you got nothing to say to that?” said Mr. Macey at last, with a slight accent of impatience.

“Oh,” said Marner slowly, shaking his head between his hands, “I thank you—thank you—kindly.”

“Ay, ay, to be sure; I thought you would,” said Mr. Macey; “and my advice is—have you got a Sunday suit?”

“No,” said Marner.

“I doubted it was so,” said Mr. Macey. “Now, let me advise you to get a Sunday suit. There’s Tookey; he’s a poor creatur, but he’s got my tailoring business, and some o’ my money in it, and he shall make a suit at a low price and give you trust, and then you can come to church, and be a bit neighbourly. Why, you’ve never heared me say ‘Amen’ since you come into these parts, and I recommend you to lose no time, for it’ll be poor work when Tookey has it all to himself, for I mayn’t be equil to stand i’ the desk at all, come another winter.” Here Mr. Macey paused, perhaps expecting some sign of emotion in his hearer; but not observing any, he went on. “And as for the money for the suit o’ clothes, why, you get a matter of a pound a week at your weaving, Master Marner, and you’re a young man, eh, for all you look so mushed. Why, you couldn’t ha’ been five-and-twenty when you come into these parts, eh?”

Silas started a little at the change to a questioning tone, and answered mildly, “I don’t know; I can’t rightly say—it’s a long while since.”

After receiving such an answer as this, it is not surprising that Mr. Macey observed later on in the evening at the Rainbow that Marner’s head was “all of a muddle,” and that it was to be doubted if he ever knew when Sunday came round, which showed him a worse heathen than many a dog.

Another of Silas’s comforters besides Mr. Macey came to him with a mind highly charged on the same topic. This was Mrs. Winthrop, the wheelwright’s wife. The inhabitants of Raveloe were not severely regular in their church-going, and perhaps there was hardly a person in the parish who would not have held that to go to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours—a wish to be better than the “common run” that would have implied a reflection on those who had had godfathers and godmothers as well as themselves, and had an equal right to the burying-service. At the same time, it was understood to be requisite for all who were not household servants or young men to take the sacrament at one of the great festivals: Squire Cass himself took it on Christmas day; while those who were held to be “good livers” went to church with greater, though still with moderate, frequency.

Mrs. Winthrop was one of these: she was in all respects a woman of scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose at half-past four, though this threw a scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the morning, which it was a constant problem with her to remove. Yet she had not the vixenish temper which is sometimes supposed to be a necessary condition of such habits: she was a very mild, patient woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life, and pasture her mind upon them. She was the person always first thought of in Raveloe when there was illness or death in a family, when leeches were to be applied, or there was a sudden disappointment in a monthly nurse. She was a “comfortable woman”—good- looking, fresh-complexioned, having her lips always slightly screwed, as if she felt herself in a sickroom with the doctor or the clergyman present. But she was never whimpering; no one had seen her shed tears; she was simply grave and inclined to shake her head and sigh almost imperceptibly, like a funereal