iet now, but not asleep--only
soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which
makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain
awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some
quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky--before a steady glowing
planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a
silent pathway. The wide-open blue eyes looked up at Godfrey's without
any uneasiness or sign of recognition: the child could make no visible
audible claim on its father; and the father felt a strange mixture of
feelings, a conflict of regret and joy, that the pulse of that little
heart had no response for the half-jealous yearning in his own, when
the blue eyes turned away from him slowly, and fixed themselves on the
weaver's queer face, which was bent low down to look at them, while the
small hand began to pull Marner's withered cheek with loving
disfiguration.

"You'll take the child to the parish to-morrow?" asked Godfrey,
speaking as indifferently as he could.

"Who says so?" said Marner, sharply. "Will they make me take her?"

"Why, you wouldn't like to keep her, should you--an old bachelor like
you?"

"Till anybody shows they've a right to take her away from me," said
Marner. "The mother's dead, and I reckon it's got no father: it's a
lone thing--and I'm a lone thing. My money's gone, I don't know
where--and this is come from I don't know where. I know nothing--I'm
partly mazed."

"Poor little thing!" said Godfrey. "Let me give something towards
finding it clothes."

He had put his hand in his pocket and found half-a-guinea, and,
thrusting it into Silas's hand, he hurried out of the cottage to
overtake Mr. Kimble.

"Ah, I see it's not the same woman I saw," he said, as he came up.
"It's a pretty little child: the old fellow seems to want to keep it;
that's strange for a miser like him. But I gave him a trifle to help
him out: the parish isn't likely to quarrel with him for the right to
keep the child."

"No; but I've seen the time when I might have quarrelled with him for
it myself. It's too late now, though. If the child ran into the fire,
your aunt's too fat to overtake it: she could only sit and grunt like
an alarmed sow. But what a fool you are, Godfrey, to come out in your
dancing shoes and stockings in this way--and you one of the beaux of
the evening, and at your own house! What do you mean by such freaks,
young fell