 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 goodwill: 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 smile upon thy face;
 Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
 And fragrance in thy
