significance now the coquetries of youth
can have nothing to do with it.

Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Cass (any higher title has died away from Raveloe
lips since the old Squire was gathered to his fathers and his
inheritance was divided) have turned round to look for the tall aged
man and the plainly dressed woman who are a little behind--Nancy having
observed that they must wait for "father and Priscilla"--and now they
all turn into a narrower path leading across the churchyard to a small
gate opposite the Red House. We will not follow them now; for may
there not be some others in this departing congregation whom we should
like to see again--some of those who are not likely to be handsomely
clad, and whom we may not recognize so easily as the master and
mistress of the Red House?

But it is impossible to mistake Silas Marner. His large brown eyes
seem to have gathered a longer vision, as is the way with eyes that
have been short-sighted in early life, and they have a less vague, a
more answering gaze; but in everything else one sees signs of a frame
much enfeebled by the lapse of the sixteen years. The weaver's bent
shoulders and white hair give him almost the look of advanced age,
though he is not more than five-and-fifty; but there is the freshest
blossom of youth close by his side--a blonde dimpled girl of eighteen,
who has vainly tried to chastise her curly auburn hair into smoothness
under her brown bonnet: the hair ripples as obstinately as a brooklet
under the March breeze, and the little ringlets burst away from the
restraining comb behind and show themselves below the bonnet-crown.
Eppie cannot help being rather vexed about her hair, for there is no
other girl in Raveloe who has hair at all like it, and she thinks hair
ought to be smooth. She does not like to be blameworthy even in small
things: you see how neatly her prayer-book is folded in her spotted
handkerchief.

That good-looking young fellow, in a new fustian suit, who walks behind
her, is not quite sure upon the question of hair in the abstract, when
Eppie puts it to him, and thinks that perhaps straight hair is the best
in general, but he doesn't want Eppie's hair to be different. She
surely divines that there is some one behind her who is thinking about
her very particularly, and mustering courage to come to her side as
soon as they are out in the lane, else why should she look rather shy,
and take care not to turn away her head from her father S