often, and we should
all be on the look-out to do everything we could towards making you
comfortable."

A plain man like Godfrey Cass, speaking under some embarrassment,
necessarily blunders on words that are coarser than his intentions, and
that are likely to fall gratingly on susceptible feelings. While he had
been speaking, Eppie had quietly passed her arm behind Silas's head,
and let her hand rest against it caressingly: she felt him trembling
violently. He was silent for some moments when Mr. Cass had
ended--powerless under the conflict of emotions, all alike painful.
Eppie's heart was swelling at the sense that her father was in
distress; and she was just going to lean down and speak to him, when
one struggling dread at last gained the mastery over every other in
Silas, and he said, faintly--

"Eppie, my child, speak. I won't stand in your way. Thank Mr. and
Mrs. Cass."

Eppie took her hand from her father's head, and came forward a step.
Her cheeks were flushed, but not with shyness this time: the sense that
her father was in doubt and suffering banished that sort of
self-consciousness. She dropped a low curtsy, first to Mrs. Cass and
then to Mr. Cass, and said--

"Thank you, ma'am--thank you, sir. But I can't leave my father, nor
own anybody nearer than him. And I don't want to be a lady--thank you
all the same" (here Eppie dropped another curtsy). "I couldn't give up
the folks I've been used to."

Eppie's lips began to tremble a little at the last words. She
retreated to her father's chair again, and held him round the neck:
while Silas, with a subdued sob, put up his hand to grasp hers.

The tears were in Nancy's eyes, but her sympathy with Eppie was,
naturally, divided with distress on her husband's account. She dared
not speak, wondering what was going on in her husband's mind.

Godfrey felt an irritation inevitable to almost all of us when we
encounter an unexpected obstacle. He had been full of his own
penitence and resolution to retrieve his error as far as the time was
left to him; he was possessed with all-important feelings, that were to
lead to a predetermined course of action which he had fixed on as the
right, and he was not prepared to enter with lively appreciation into
other people's feelings counteracting his virtuous resolves. The
agitation with which he spoke again was not quite unmixed with anger.

"But I've a claim on you, Eppie--the strongest of all claims. It's my
dut