nine o'clock
`` It 'll be different coming to us , now she 's grown up , '' said Nancy , shaking her head sadly . `` But it 's your duty to acknowledge her and provide for her ; and I 'll do my part by her , and pray to God Almighty to make her love me . '' `` Then we 'll go together to Silas Marner 's this very night , as soon as everything 's quiet at the Stone-pits . '' Between eight and nine o'clock that evening , Eppie and Silas were seated alone in the cottage . After the great excitement the weaver had undergone from the events of the afternoon , he had felt a longing for this quietude , and had even begged Mrs. Winthrop and Aaron , who had naturally lingered behind every one else , to leave him alone with his child . The excitement had not passed away : it had only reached that stage when the keenness of the susceptibility makes external stimulus intolerable -- when there is no sense of weariness , but rather an intensity of inward life , under which sleep is an impossibility . Any one who has watched such moments in other men remembers the brightness of the eyes and the strange definiteness that comes over coarse features from that transient influence .