our life might have been more like what we used to think it 'ud be."

The tears fell, and Nancy ceased to speak.

"But you wouldn't have married me then, Nancy, if I'd told you," said
Godfrey, urged, in the bitterness of his self-reproach, to prove to
himself that his conduct had not been utter folly. "You may think you
would now, but you wouldn't then. With your pride and your father's,
you'd have hated having anything to do with me after the talk there'd
have been."

"I can't say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should
never have married anybody else. But I wasn't worth doing wrong
for--nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems
beforehand--not even our marrying wasn't, you see." There was a faint
sad smile on Nancy's face as she said the last words.

"I'm a worse man than you thought I was, Nancy," said Godfrey, rather
tremulously. "Can you forgive me ever?"

"The wrong to me is but little, Godfrey: you've made it up to
me--you've been good to me for fifteen years. It's another you did the
wrong to; and I doubt it can never be all made up for."

"But we can take Eppie now," said Godfrey. "I won't mind the world
knowing at last. I'll be plain and open for the rest o' my life."

"It'll be different coming to us, now she's grown up," said Nancy,
shaking her head sadly. "But it's your duty to acknowledge her and
provide for her; and I'll do my part by her, and pray to God Almighty
to make her love me."

"Then we'll go together to Silas Marner's this very night, as soon as
everything's quiet at the Stone-pits."

CHAPTER XIX

Between eight and nine o'clock that evening, Eppie and Silas were
seated alone in the cottage. After the great excitement the weaver had
undergone from the events of the afternoon, he had felt a longing for
this quietude, and had even begged Mrs. Winthrop and Aaron, who had
naturally lingered behind every one else, to leave him alone with his
child. The excitement had not passed away: it had only reached that
stage when the keenness of the susceptibility makes external stimulus
intolerable--when there is no sense of weariness, but rather an
intensity of inward life, under which sleep is an impossibility. Any
one who has watched such moments in other men remembers the brightness
of the eyes and the strange definiteness that comes over coarse
features from that transient influence. It is as if a new fineness of
ear for all spiritual voices had