it was his own child he saw in Marner's arms.

The woman was dead--had been dead for some hours, the doctor said; and
Godfrey, who had accompanied him to Marner's cottage, understood that he
was free to marry Nancy Lammeter.

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

"Who says so?" said Marner sharply. "Will they make me take her? I shall
keep her till anybody shows they've a right to take her away from me.
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."

Godfrey returned to the Red House with a sense of relief and gladness,
and Silas kept the child. There had been a softening of feeling to him
in the village since the day of his robbery, and now an active sympathy
was aroused amongst the women. The child was christened Hephzibah, after
Marner's mother, and was called Eppie for short.


_IV--Eppie's Decision_


Eppie had come to link Silas Marner once more with the whole world. The
disposition to hoard had utterly gone, and there was no longer any
repulsion around to him.

As the child grew up, one person watched with keener, though more