and cheerful and pleasant to all, afforded to none of them an
opportunity for anything approaching intimacy.

On Sundays, the times alone when their occupations enabled the
youth of Varley to devote themselves to attentions to the maidens
they favored, Mary Powlett was not to be found at home after
breakfast, for, having set everything in readiness for dinner,
she always started for Marsden, taking little Susan with her, and
there spent the day with the woman who had even more than Eliza
Marner been her mother. She had, a month after his wife's death,
fought a battle with Luke and conquered. The latter had, in pursuance
of the plans he had originally drawn up for her, proposed that she
should go into service at Marsden.

"Oi shall miss thee sorely, Polly," he said; "and oi doan't disguise
it from thee, vor the last year, lass, thou hast been the light o'
this house, and oi couldna have spared ye. But oi ha' always fixed
that thou shouldst go into service at Marsden--Varley is not fit
vor the likes o' ye. We be a rough lot here, and a drunken; and
though oi shall miss thee sorely for awhile, oi must larn to do
wi'out thee."

Polly heard him in silence, and then positively refused to go.

"You have been all to me, feyther, since I was a child, and I am
not going to leave you now. I don't say that Varley is altogether
nice, but I shall be very happy here with you and the boys and dear
little Susan, and I am not going to leave, and so--there!"

Luke knew well how great would be the void which her absence would