cement of human well-being, no
profit even to himself, save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety
at last; an object that has been already far more fully and ably
achieved. On the other stands her clear undoubting _conscience_ of her
own truest and highest course,--the course to which every prompting of
the Divine within impels her,--that she shall not thus isolate herself
within this narrowest sphere, shut herself out from all social sympathies
and social outgoings, and sacrifice to the Dead Hand that holds her in
its cold remorseless clutch every interest that may be intrusted to her.
We instinctively shudder at the result; but we never doubt what the
answer will be. We know that the tender, womanly, wifely pitifulness,
the causeless remorse, will be the nearest and most urgent conscience,
and will prevail. The agonised assent is to be given; but it falls on
the ear of the dead.

It is scarcely necessary to follow Dorothea minutely through all the
details of her widowed relations to Mr Casaubon. Enough that these are
all in touching and beautiful harmony with everything that has gone
before. No resentment, no recalcitration against all the ever-gathering
perplexity, pain, and anguish he has caused her--nothing but the sweet
unfailing pitifulness, the uncalled-for repentance, almost remorse, over
her own assumed shortcomings and deficiencies--her failures to be to him
what in those first days of her childlike simplicity and innocence she
had hoped she might become. Even on the discovery of the worse than
treachery, of the mean insulting malignity with which, trusting to her
confiding purity and truthfulness, he had sought to grasp her for life in
his "Dead Hand" with regard to Ladislaw, and she only escaped the
irrevocable bond her own blindly-given pledge would have fixed around her
by his death,--the momentary and violent shock of revulsion from her dead
husband, who had had hidden thoughts of her, perhaps perverting
everything she said or did, _terrified her as if it had been a sin_.

It is not alone, however, toward her husband that this simple,
unconscious self-devotion and self-abnegation of Dorothea Brooke displays
itself. Toward every one with whom she comes in contact, it steals out
unobtrusively and silently, as the dew from heaven on the tender grass,
to each and all according to the kind and nearness of that relation. Even
for her "pulpy" uncle she has no supercilious contempt--no sense of
iso