As Lydgate rode away, he thought, “This young creature has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary.  She evidently thinks nothing of her own future, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her.  She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before—­ a fountain of friendship towards men—­a man can make a friend of her.  Casaubon must have raised some heroic hallucination in her.  I wonder if she could have any other sort of passion for a man?  Ladislaw?—­there was certainly an unusual feeling between them.  And Casaubon must have had a notion of it.  Well—­her love might help a man more than her money.”

Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate from his obligation to Bulstrode, which she felt sure was a part, though small, of the galling pressure he had to bear.  She sat down at once under the inspiration of their interview, and wrote a brief note, in which she pleaded that she had more claim than Mr. Bulstrode had to the satisfaction of providing the money which had been serviceable to Lydgate—­that it would be unkind in Lydgate not to grant her the position of being his helper in this small matter, the favor being entirely to her who had so little that was plainly marked out for her to do with her superfluous money.  He might call her a creditor or by any other name if it did but imply that he granted her request.  She enclosed a check for a thousand pounds, and determined to take the letter with her the next day when she went to see Rosamond.

CHAPTER LXXVII.

“And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion.” 

          
                                                              —­Henry V.

The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he should be away until the evening.  Of late she had never gone beyond her own house and garden, except to church, and once to see her papa, to whom she said, “If Tertius goes away, you will help us to move, will you not, papa?  I suppose we shall have very little money.  I am sure I hope some one will help us.”  And Mr. Vincy had said, “Yes, child, I don’t mind a hundred or two.  I can see the end of that.”  With these exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense, fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw’s coming as the one point of hope and interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London, till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the going, without at all seeing how.  This way of establishing sequences is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.  And it is precisely this sort