purpose."

He was thinking "Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
recommend it in her hearing; however--what does it signify now?"

But he said nothing of Bulstrode's offer to him. Will was very open
and careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more
exquisite touches in nature's modelling of him that he had a delicate
generosity which warned him into reticence here. He shrank from saying
that he had rejected Bulstrode's money, in the moment when he was
learning that it was Lydgate's misfortune to have accepted it.

Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence. He made no
allusion to Rosamond's feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he
only said, "Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and
say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me."
Observing a change in Will's face, he avoided any further mention of
her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each other not
to fear that his words might have some hidden painful bearing on it.
And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real cause of the present
visit to Middlemarch.

The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed
the extent of his companion's trouble. When Lydgate spoke with
desperate resignation of going to settle in London, and said with a
faint smile, "We shall have you again, old fellow." Will felt
inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing. Rosamond had that morning
entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if
he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was
sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of
circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single
momentous bargain.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our
future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into
insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly
groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed to him
this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an
obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate's
unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled
life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.

CHAPTER LXXX.

"Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the