ealings with us--there's dealings."

This dialogue took place in Eppie's earlier years, when Silas had to
part with her for two hours every day, that she might learn to read at
the dame school, after he had vainly tried himself to guide her in that
first step to learning. Now that she was grown up, Silas had often
been led, in those moments of quiet outpouring which come to people who
live together in perfect love, to talk with _her_ too of the past, and
how and why he had lived a lonely man until she had been sent to him.
For it would have been impossible for him to hide from Eppie that she
was not his own child: even if the most delicate reticence on the point
could have been expected from Raveloe gossips in her presence, her own
questions about her mother could not have been parried, as she grew up,
without that complete shrouding of the past which would have made a
painful barrier between their minds. So Eppie had long known how her
mother had died on the snowy ground, and how she herself had been found
on the hearth by father Silas, who had taken her golden curls for his
lost guineas brought back to him. The tender and peculiar love with
which Silas had reared her in almost inseparable companionship with
himself, aided by the seclusion of their dwelling, had preserved her
from the lowering influences of the village talk and habits, and had
kept her mind in that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to
be an invariable attribute of rusticity. Perfect love has a breath of
poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human
beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time
when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas's
hearth; so that it is not surprising if, in other things besides her
delicate prettiness, she was not quite a common village maiden, but had
a touch of refinement and fervour which came from no other teaching
than that of tenderly-nurtured unvitiated feeling. She was too
childish and simple for her imagination to rove into questions about
her unknown father; for a long while it did not even occur to her that
she must have had a father; and the first time that the idea of her
mother having had a husband presented itself to her, was when Silas
showed her the wedding-ring which had been taken from the wasted
finger, and had been carefully preserved by him in a little lackered
box shaped like a shoe. He delivered this box into Eppie's charge