Rosamond had never been spoken to in such tones before.  I am not sure that she knew what the words were:  but she looked at Lydgate and the tears fell over her cheeks.  There could have been no more complete answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else, completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy, actually put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly—­ he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering—­and kissed each of the two large tears.  This was a strange way of arriving at an understanding, but it was a short way.  Rosamond was not angry, but she moved backward a little in timid happiness, and Lydgate could now sit near her and speak less incompletely.  Rosamond had to make her little confession, and he poured out words of gratitude and tenderness with impulsive lavishment.  In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman’s to whom he had bound himself.

He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy, who, just returned from Stone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long before he heard of Mr. Featherstone’s demise.  The felicitous word “demise,” which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits even above their usual evening pitch.  The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.  Considered as a demise, old Featherstone’s death assumed a merely legal aspect, so that Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff-box over it and be jovial, without even an intermittent affectation of solemnity; and Mr. Vincy hated both solemnity and affectation.  Who was ever awe struck about a testator, or sang a hymn on the title to real property?  Mr. Vincy was inclined to take a jovial view of all things that evening:  he even observed to Lydgate that Fred had got the family constitution after all, and would soon be as fine a fellow as ever again; and when his approbation of Rosamond’s engagement was asked for, he gave it with astonishing facility, passing at once to general remarks on the desirableness of matrimony for young men and maidens, and apparently deducing from the whole the appropriateness of a little more punch.

CHAPTER XXXII.

    “They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk.” 
                                —­SHAKESPEARE:  Tempest.

The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr. Featherstone’s insistent demand that Fred and his mother should not leave him, was a feeble emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts of the old man’s blood-relations, who naturally manifested more their sense of the family tie and were more visibly numerous now that he had become bedridden.  Naturally:  for when “poor Peter” had occupied his arm-chair in the wainscoted parlor, no assiduous beetles for whom the cook prepares