“I shall never forget what you have done,” Fred answered.  “I can’t say anything that seems worth saying—­only I will try that your goodness shall not be thrown away.”

“That’s enough.  Good-by, and God bless you.”

In that way they parted.  But both of them walked about a long while before they went out of the starlight.  Much of Fred’s rumination might be summed up in the words, “It certainly would have been a fine thing for her to marry Farebrother—­but if she loves me best and I am a good husband?”

Perhaps Mr. Farebrother’s might be concentrated into a single shrug and one little speech.  “To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!”

CHAPTER LXVII.

    Now is there civil war within the soul: 
    Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne
    By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier
    Makes humble compact, plays the supple part
    Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist
    For hungry rebels.

Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room, and brought away no encouragement to make a raid on luck.  On the contrary, he felt unmixed disgust with himself the next day when he had to pay four or five pounds over and above his gains, and he carried about with him a most unpleasant vision of the figure he had made, not only rubbing elbows with the men at the Green Dragon but behaving just as they did.  A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly distinguishable from a Philistine under the same circumstances:  the difference will chiefly be found in his subsequent reflections, and Lydgate chewed a very disagreeable cud in that way.  His reason told him how the affair might have been magnified into ruin by a slight change of scenery—­if it had been a gambling-house that he had turned into, where chance could be clutched with both hands instead of being picked up with thumb and fore-finger.  Nevertheless, though reason strangled the desire to gamble, there remained the feeling that, with an assurance of luck to the needful amount, he would have liked to gamble, rather than take the alternative which was beginning to urge itself as inevitable.

That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode.  Lydgate had so many times boasted both to himself and others that he was totally independent of Bulstrode, to whose plans he had lent himself solely because they enabled him to carry out his own ideas of professional work and public benefit—­he had so constantly in their personal intercourse had his pride sustained by the sense that he was making a good social use of this predominating banker, whose opinions he thought contemptible and whose motives often seemed to him an absurd mixture of contradictory impressions—­ that he had been creating for himself strong ideal obstacles to the proffering of any considerable request to him on his own account.