Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother’s hints very cordially, though he would hardly have borne them from another man.  He could not help remembering that he had lately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable, and he had no intention now to do more than keep house in a simple way.  The furniture for which he owed would not want renewing; nor even the stock of wine for a long while.

Many thoughts cheered him at that time—­and justly.  A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.  At home, that same evening when he had been chatting with Mr. Farebrother, he had his long legs stretched on the sofa, his head thrown back, and his hands clasped behind it according to his favorite ruminating attitude, while Rosamond sat at the piano, and played one tune after another, of which her husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he was!) that they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious sea-breezes.

There was something very fine in Lydgate’s look just then, and any one might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement.  In his dark eyes and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the fulness of contemplative thought—­the mind not searching, but beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled with what is behind it.

Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close to the sofa and opposite her husband’s face.

“Is that enough music for you, my lord?” she said, folding her hands before her and putting on a little air of meekness.

“Yes, dear, if you are tired,” said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving.  Rosamond’s presence at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake, and her woman’s instinct in this matter was not dull.

“What is absorbing you?” she said, leaning forward and bringing her face nearer to his.

He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.

“I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy.”

“I can’t guess,” said Rosamond, shaking her head.  “We used to play at guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon’s, but not anatomists.”

“I’ll tell you.  His name was Vesalius.  And the only way he could get to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from graveyards and places of execution.”

“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, “I am very glad you are not Vesalius.  I should have thought he might find some less horrible way than that.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much notice of her answer.  “He could only get a complete skeleton by snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of night.”