Silas' entry at the Red House parallels the earlier one at the Rainbow. It is seen from the point of view of the spectators: Silas is not seen approaching, but appears suddenly amid the festivities. Once again there is the feeling that a ghost has burst in, but this time only Godfrey feels it, and he is looking at the child. Eliot continues her careful handling of Godfrey. Even when he pretends not to know his child and his dead wife, he seems not evil but weak. He is "half-smothered by passionate desire and dread," yet he has the sense that "he ought to accept the consequences of his deeds, own the miserable wife, and fulfil the claims of the helpless child. But he had not moral courage enough to contemplate that active renunciation of Nancy as possible for him; he had only conscience and heart enough to make him forever uneasy under the weakness."
Godfrey is kept from seeming wicked, but we are never allowed to forget the consequences of his weakness — what it has done to him as well as to others. When he first hears of the woman's death, his first emotion is the "evil terror" that she might not be dead. Yet he feels regret that the child seems happy with Marner and shows no response to his own "half-jealous yearning."
