Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to hers.  He had looked forward to her learning the truth from others, and had acquiesced in that probability, as something easier to him than any confession.  But now that he imagined the moment of her knowledge come, he awaited the result in anguish.  His daughters had been obliged to consent to leave him, and though he had allowed some food to be brought to him, he had not touched it.  He felt himself perishing slowly in unpitied misery.  Perhaps he should never see his wife’s face with affection in it again.  And if he turned to God there seemed to be no answer but the pressure of retribution.

It was eight o’clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife entered.  He dared not look up at her.  He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller—­ he seemed so withered and shrunken.  A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly—­

“Look up, Nicholas.”

He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment:  her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, “I know;” and her hands and eyes rested gently on him.  He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side.  They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them.  His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.  Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire.  She could not say, “How much is only slander and false suspicion?” and he did not say, “I am innocent.”

CHAPTER LXXV.

    “Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et
    l’ignorance de la vanité des plaisirs absents causent
    l’inconstance.”—­PASCAL.

Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors were paid.  But she was not joyous:  her married life had fulfilled none of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination.  In this brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had often been stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the pain Rosamond had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her; but he, too, had lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it necessary to refer to an economical change in their way of living as a matter of course, trying to reconcile her to it gradually, and repressing his anger when she answered by wishing