oney. I am sure I
hope some one will help us." And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I
don't mind a hundred or two. I can see the end of that." With these
exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and
interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make
immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London,
till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the
going, without at all seeing how. This way of establishing sequences
is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.
And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest
shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is
often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except
the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of
doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was the process
going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her
with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--or sat down to
the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the
music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and
looking before her in dreamy ennui. Her melancholy had become so
marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual
silent reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities
towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have
bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it
had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.

But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--where she
sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--equipped for a walk
in the town. She had a letter to post--a letter addressed to Mr.
Ladislaw and written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten
his arrival by a hint of trouble. The servant-maid, their sole
house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs in her walking dress,
and thought "there never did anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor
thing."

Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going to
Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable
future, which gathered round the idea of that visit. Until yesterday
when Lydgate had opened