“My dear, you’ll be a treasure to me,” said Nancy in her gentle voice. “We shall want for nothing when we have our daughter.”

Eppie did not come forward and curtsy as she had done before. She held Silas’s hand in hers, and grasped it firmly—it was a weaver’s hand, with a palm and finger-tips that were sensitive to such pressure—while she spoke with colder decision than before.

“Thank you, ma’am—thank you, sir, for your offers—they’re very great, and far above my wish. For I should have no delight i’ life any more if I was forced to go away from my father, and knew he was sitting at home, a-thinking of me and feeling lone. We’ve been used to be happy together every day, and I can’t think o’ no happiness without him. And he says he’d nobody i’ the world till I was sent to him, and he’d have nothing when I was gone. And he’s took care of me and loved me from the first, and I’ll cleave to him as long as he lives, and nobody shall ever come between him and me.”

“But you must make sure, Eppie,” said Silas, in a low voice—“you must make sure as you won’t ever be sorry, because you’ve made your choice to stay among poor folks, and with poor clothes and things, when you might ha’ had everything o’ the best.”

His sensitiveness on this point had increased as he listened to Eppie’s words of faithful affection.

“I can never be sorry, father,” said Eppie. “I shouldn’t know what to think on or to wish for with fine things about me, as I haven’t been used to. And it ’ud be poor work for me to put on things, and ride in a gig, and sit in a place at church, as ’ud make them as I’m fond of think me unfitting company for ’em. What could I care for then?”

Nancy looked at Godfrey with a pained, questioning glance. But his eyes were fixed on the floor, where he was moving the end of his stick, as if he were pondering on something absently. She thought there was a word which might perhaps come better from her lips than from his.

“What you say is natural, my dear child; it’s natural you should cling to those who’ve brought you up,” she said mildly; “but there’s a duty you owe to your lawful father. There’s perhaps something to be given up on more sides than one. When your father opens his home to you, I think it’s right you shouldn’t turn your back on it.”

“I can’t feel as I’ve got any father but one,” said Eppie impetuously, while the tears gathered. “I’ve always thought of a little home where he’d sit i’ the corner, and I should fend and do everything for him. I can’t think o’ no other home. I wasn’t brought up to be a lady, and I can’t turn my mind to it. I like the working- folks and their victuals and their ways. And,” she ended passionately, while the tears fell, “I’m promised to marry a working-man, as ’ll live with father, and help me to take care of him.”

Godfrey looked up at Nancy with a flushed face and smarting, dilated eyes. This frustration of a purpose towards which he had set out under the exalted consciousness that he was about to compensate in some degree for the greatest demerit of his life made him feel the air of the room stifling.

“Let us go,” he said in an undertone.

“We won’t talk of this any longer now,” said Nancy, rising. “We’re your well-wishers, my dear—and yours too, Marner. We shall come and see you again. It’s getting late now.”

In this way she covered her husband’s abrupt departure, for Godfrey had gone straight to the door, unable to say more.