vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue.  When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die—­ and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.  To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.  In such an hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward—­ perhaps with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion.  What was Mr. Casaubon’s bias his acts will give us a clew to.  He held himself to be, with some private scholarly reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of the present and hopes of the future.  But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire:  the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.  And Mr. Casaubon’s immediate desire was not for divine communion and light divested of earthly conditions; his passionate longings, poor man, clung low and mist-like in very shady places.

Dorothea had been aware when Lydgate had ridden away, and she had stepped into the garden, with the impulse to go at once to her husband.  But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her ardor, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder; and she wandered slowly round the nearer clumps of trees until she saw him advancing.  Then she went towards him, and might have represented a heaven-sent angel coming with a promise that the short hours remaining should yet be filled with that faithful love which clings the closer to a comprehended grief.  His glance in reply to hers was so chill that she felt her timidity increased; yet she turned and passed her hand through his arm.

Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her.  That is a strong word, but not too strong:  it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—­calling their denial knowledge.  You may ask why, in the name of manliness, Mr. Casaubon should have behaved in that way.  Consider that his was a mind which shrank from pity:  have you ever watched in such a mind the effect of a suspicion that what is pressing it as a grief may be really a source of contentment, either actual or future, to the being who already offends by pitying?  Besides, he knew little of Dorothea’s sensations, and had not reflected that on such an occasion as the present they were comparable in strength to his own sensibilities about Carp’s criticisms.