a creature who cared little for what are called the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance of a fortune.  What others might have called the futility of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination:  he was conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.  Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul:  no other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,—­

“Queens hereafter might be glad to live
Upon the alms of her superfluous praise.”

But this result was questionable.  And what else could he do for Dorothea?  What was his devotion worth to her?  It was impossible to tell.  He would not go out of her reach.  He saw no creature among her friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple confidence as to him.  She had once said that she would like him to stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her.

This had always been the conclusion of Will’s hesitations.  But he was not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own resolve.  He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr. Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be, and this was always associated with the other ground of irritation—­that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for Dorothea’s sake, he could hardly ever see her.  Whereupon, not being able to contradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own strongest bias and said, “I am a fool.”

Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea, he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see her.  He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational morning light, Objection said—­

“That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon’s prohibition to visit Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased.”

“Nonsense!” argued Inclination, “it would be too monstrous for him to hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring morning.  And Dorothea will be glad.”

“It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy him or to see Dorothea.”

“It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see Dorothea?  Is he to have everything to himself and be always comfortable?  Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to do.  I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation; besides, I know the Tuckers:  I shall go into their pew.”