reflection. We are apt to think it
inevitable that a man in Marner's position should have begun to
question the validity of an appeal to the divine judgment by drawing
lots; but to him this would have been an effort of independent thought
such as he had never known; and he must have made the effort at a
moment when all his energies were turned into the anguish of
disappointed faith. If there is an angel who records the sorrows of
men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows
that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.

Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair,
without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in his
innocence. The second day he took refuge from benumbing unbelief, by
getting into his loom and working away as usual; and before many hours
were past, the minister and one of the deacons came to him with the
message from Sarah, that she held her engagement to him at an end.
Silas received the message mutely, and then turned away from the
messengers to work at his loom again. In little more than a month from
that time, Sarah was married to William Dane; and not long afterwards
it was known to the brethren in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had
departed from the town.

CHAPTER II

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes
find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on
their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys
and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported
to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their
history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows
another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their
souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their
old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of
exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all
vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no
memories. But even _their_ experience may hardly enable them
thoroughly to imagine what was the effect on a simple weaver like Silas
Marner, when he left his own country and people and came to settle in
Raveloe. Nothing could be more unlike his native town, set within
sight of the widespread hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where
he felt hidden even from the heavens by the screening trees an