his thorough and frankly declared sympathy; and the
reason why, in spite of that claim, it would have been better for Will
to have avoided all further intimacy, or even contact, with Lydgate,
was precisely of the kind to make such a course appear impossible. To
a creature of Will's susceptible temperament--without any neutral
region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that
befell him into the collisions of a passionate drama--the revelation
that Rosamond had made her happiness in any way dependent on him was a
difficulty which his outburst of rage towards her had immeasurably
increased for him. He hated his own cruelty, and yet he dreaded to
show the fulness of his relenting: he must go to her again; the
friendship could not be put to a sudden end; and her unhappiness was a
power which he dreaded. And all the while there was no more foretaste
of enjoyment in the life before him than if his limbs had been lopped
off and he was making his fresh start on crutches. In the night he had
debated whether he should not get on the coach, not for Riverston, but
for London, leaving a note to Lydgate which would give a makeshift
reason for his retreat. But there were strong cords pulling him back
from that abrupt departure: the blight on his happiness in thinking of
Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which had remained in spite
of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery
for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance
which was also despair.

Thus he did nothing more decided than taking the Riverston coach. He
came back again by it while it was still daylight, having made up his
mind that he must go to Lydgate's that evening. The Rubicon, we know,
was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay
entirely in certain invisible conditions. Will felt as if he were
forced to cross his small boundary ditch, and what he saw beyond it was
not empire, but discontented subjection.

But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to witness
the saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue
that may lie in a self-subduing act of fellowship. If Dorothea, after
her night's anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond--why, she
perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for
discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those
three who were on one hearth in Lydgate's house at half-past