In the five minutes’ drive to the Hospital she had time for some reflections that were quite new to her.  Her decision to go, and her preoccupation in leaving the room, had come from the sudden sense that there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing any further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable to mention to her husband, and already her errand in seeking Lydgate was a matter of concealment.  That was all that had been explicitly in her mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort.  Now that she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man’s voice and the accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her husband’s absence.  And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the fact?  But Will was Mr. Casaubon’s relative, and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness.  Still there had been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that Mr. Casaubon did not like his cousin’s visits during his own absence.  “Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things,” said poor Dorothea to herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.  She felt confusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been so clear to her before was mysteriously spoiled.  But the carriage stopped at the gate of the Hospital.  She was soon walking round the grass plots with Lydgate, and her feelings recovered the strong bent which had made her seek for this interview.

Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was mortified, and knew the reason of it clearly enough.  His chances of meeting Dorothea were rare; and here for the first time there had come a chance which had set him at a disadvantage.  It was not only, as it had been hitherto, that she was not supremely occupied with him, but that she had seen him under circumstances in which he might appear not to be supremely occupied with her.  He felt thrust to a new distance from her, amongst the circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life.  But that was not his fault:  of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town, he had been making as many acquaintances as he could, his position requiring that he should know everybody and everything.  Lydgate was really better worth knowing than any one else in the neighborhood, and he happened to have a wife who was musical and altogether worth calling upon.  Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper.  It was mortifying.  Will was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch but for Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from her with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to the persistence of mutual interest than all the