ly if
the day had been fixed, smiled with the pleasant consciousness of a
lover who could say "yes", if he liked. He felt a reformed man,
delivered from temptation; and the vision of his future life seemed to
him as a promised land for which he had no cause to fight. He saw
himself with all his happiness centred on his own hearth, while Nancy
would smile on him as he played with the children.

And that other child--not on the hearth--he would not forget it; he
would see that it was well provided for. That was a father's duty.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XVI

It was a bright autumn Sunday, sixteen years after Silas Marner had
found his new treasure on the hearth. The bells of the old Raveloe
church were ringing the cheerful peal which told that the morning
service was ended; and out of the arched doorway in the tower came
slowly, retarded by friendly greetings and questions, the richer
parishioners who had chosen this bright Sunday morning as eligible for
church-going. It was the rural fashion of that time for the more
important members of the congregation to depart first, while their
humbler neighbours waited and looked on, stroking their bent heads or
dropping their curtsies to any large ratepayer who turned to notice
them.

Foremost among these advancing groups of well-clad people, there are
some whom we shall recognize, in spite of Time, who has laid his hand
on them all. The tall blond man of forty is not much changed in
feature from the Godfrey Cass of six-and-twenty: he is only fuller in
flesh, and has only lost the indefinable look of youth--a loss which is
marked even when the eye is undulled and the wrinkles are not yet come.
Perhaps the pretty woman, not much younger than he, who is leaning on
his arm, is more changed than her husband: the lovely bloom that used
to be always on her cheek now comes but fitfully, with the fresh
morning air or with some strong surprise; yet to all who love human
faces best for what they tell of human experience, Nancy's beauty has a
heightened interest. Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness
while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never
divine the preciousness of the fruit. But the years have not been so
cruel to Nancy. The firm yet placid mouth, the clear veracious glance
of the brown eyes, speak now of a nature that has been tested and has
kept its highest qualities; and even the costume, with its dainty
neatness and purity, has more