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 and unvitiated feeling.
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