He made out the marks of the little feet in the snow, and, holding the child in his arms, followed their track to the furze-bush.  Then he became aware that there was something more than the bush before him—­that there was a human body, half covered with the shifting snow.

With the child in his arms, Silas at once went for the doctor, who was spending the evening at the Red House.  And Godfrey Cass recognised that 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 hidden, interest than any other the prosperous growth of Eppie under the weaver’s care.  The squire was dead, and Godfrey Cass was married to Nancy Lammeter.  He had no child of his own save the one that knew him not.  No Dunsey had ever turned up, and people had ceased to think of him.

Sixteen years had passed, and now Aaron Winthrop, a well-behaved young gardener, is wanting to marry Eppie, and Eppie is willing to have him “some time.”

“‘Everybody’s married some time,’ Aaron says,” said Eppie.  “But I told him that wasn’t true, for I said look at father—­he’s never been married.”

“No, child,” said Silas, “your father was a lone man till you was sent to him.”

“But you’ll never be lone again, father,” said Eppie tenderly.  “That was what Aaron said—­’I could never think o’ taking you away from Master Marner, Eppie.’  And I said, ’It ‘ud be no use if you did, Aaron.’  And he wants us all to live together, so as you needn’t work a bit, father, only what’s for your own pleasure, and he’d be as good as a son to you—­that was what he said.”

The proposal to separate Eppie from her foster-father came from Godfrey Cass.

When the old stone-pit by Marner’s cottage went dry, owing to drainage operations, the skeleton of Dunstan Cass was found, wedged between two great stones.  The watch and seals were recognised, and all the weaver’s money was at the bottom of the pit.  The shock of this discovery moved Godfrey to tell Nancy the secret of his earlier marriage.