Left groping in
darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense,
though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it
must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation
at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on
their goodwill. He opened the door wide to admit Dolly, but without
otherwise returning her greeting than by moving the armchair a few
inches as a sign that she was to sit down in it. Dolly, as soon as she
was seated, removed the white cloth that covered her lard-cakes, and
said in her gravest way:
'I'd a baking yisterday, Master Marner, and the lard-cakes turned
out better nor common, and I'd ha' asked you to accept some, if
you'd thought well. I don't eat such things myself, for a bit o'
bread's what I like from one year's end to the other; but men's
stomichs are made so comical, they want a change- they do, I know, God
help 'em.'
Dolly sighed gently as she held out the cakes to Silas, who thanked
her kindly, and looked very close at them, absently, being
accustomed to look so at everything he took into his hand- eyed all
the while by the wondering bright orbs of the small Aaron, who had
made an outwork of his mother's chair, and was peeping round from
behind it.
'There's letters pricked on 'em,' said Dolly. 'I can't read 'em
myself, and there's nobody, not Mr Macey himself, rightly knows what
they mean; but they've a good meaning, for they're the same as is on
the pulpit-cloth at church.
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