us things to do now. I have a living to give away. You know Mr.
Tyke and all the--" But Dorothea's effort was too much for her; she
broke off and burst into sobs. Lydgate made her drink a dose of sal
volatile.

"Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes," he said to Sir James, whom he
asked to see before quitting the house. "She wants perfect freedom, I
think, more than any other prescription."

His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him
to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life. He
felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of
self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in
another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.

Lydgate's advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow when he
found that Celia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant fact about
the will. There was no help for it now--no reason for any further
delay in the execution of necessary business. And the next day Sir
James complied at once with her request that he would drive her to
Lowick.

"I have no wish to stay there at present," said Dorothea; "I could
hardly bear it. I am much happier at Freshitt with Celia. I shall be
able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at
it from a distance. And I should like to be at the Grange a little
while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the
people in the village."

"Not yet, I think. Your uncle is having political company, and you are
better out of the way of such doings," said Sir James, who at that
moment thought of the Grange chiefly as a haunt of young Ladislaw's.
But no word passed between him and Dorothea about the objectionable
part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it
between them would be impossible. Sir James was shy, even with men,
about disagreeable subjects; and the one thing that Dorothea would have
chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to
her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her
husband's injustice. Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what
had passed between her and her husband about Will Ladislaw's moral
claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him
as it was to her, that her husband's strange indelicate proviso had
been chiefly urged by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and
not merely by personal feel