ly endure any
subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in
reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which
fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging
life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead
disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence
was broken down--the support was snatched away. Marner's thoughts
could no longer move in their old round, and were baffled by a blank
like that which meets a plodding ant when the earth has broken away on
its homeward path. The loom was there, and the weaving, and the
growing pattern in the cloth; but the bright treasure in the hole under
his feet was gone; the prospect of handling and counting it was gone:
the evening had no phantasm of delight to still the poor soul's
craving. The thought of the money he would get by his actual work
could bring no joy, for its meagre image was only a fresh reminder of
his loss; and hope was too heavily crushed by the sudden blow for his
imagination to dwell on the growth of a new hoard from that small
beginning.

He filled up the blank with grief. As he sat weaving, he every now and
then moaned low, like one in pain: it was the sign that his thoughts
had come round again to the sudden chasm--to the empty evening-time.
And all the evening, as he sat in his loneliness by his dull fire, he
leaned his elbows on his knees, and clasped his head with his hands,
and moaned very low--not as one who seeks to be heard.

And yet he was not utterly forsaken in his trouble. The repulsion
Marner had always created in his neighbours was partly dissipated by
the new light in which this misfortune had shown him. Instead of a man
who had more cunning than honest folks could come by, and, what was
worse, had not the inclination to use that cunning in a neighbourly
way, it was now apparent that Silas had not cunning enough to keep his
own. He was generally spoken of as a "poor mushed creatur"; and that
avoidance of his neighbours, which had before been referred to his
ill-will and to a probable addiction to worse company, was now
considered mere craziness.

This change to a kindlier feeling was shown in various ways. The odour
of Christmas cooking being on the wind, it was the season when
superfluous pork and black puddings are suggestive of charity in
well-to-do families; and Silas's misfortune had brought him uppermost
in the mem