was not more than a hundred yards away.


_III.--Silas Marner's Visitor_


It was New Year's Eve, and Squire Cass was giving a dance to the
neighbouring gentry of Raveloe. There had been snow in the afternoon,
but at seven o'clock it had ceased, and a freezing wind had sprung up.

A woman, shabbily dressed, with a child in her arms, was making her way
towards Raveloe, seeking the Red House, where Squire Cass lived. It was
not the squire she wanted, but his eldest son, Godfrey, to whom she was
secretly married. The marriage--the result of rash impulse--had been an
unhappy one from the first, for Godfrey's wife was the slave of opium.
The squire had long desired that his son should marry Miss Nancy
Lammeter, and would have turned him out of house and home had he known
of the unfortunate marriage already contracted. Cold and weariness drove
the woman, even while she walked, to the only comfort she knew. She
raised the black remnant to her lips, and then flung the empty phial
away. Now she walked, always more and more drowsily, and clutched more
and more automatically the sleeping child at her bosom. Soon she felt
nothing but a supreme longing to lie down and sleep; and so sank down
against a straggling furze-bush, an easy pillow enough; and the bed of
snow, too, was soft. The cold was no longer felt, but her arms did not
at once relax their instinctive clutch, and the little one slumbered on.

The complete torpor came at last; the fingers lost their tension, the
arms unbent; then the little head fell away from the bosom, and the blue
eyes of the child opened wide on the cold starlight. At first there was