“Drive on to Freshitt Hall,” she said to the coachman, and any one looking at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual she was never animated by a more self-possessed energy.  And that was really her experience.  It was as if she had drunk a great draught of scorn that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.  She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object.  She needed something active to turn her excitement out upon.  She felt power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink.  And she would carry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of going to Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that she wished them to know about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under his trial now presented itself to her with new significance, and made her more ardent in readiness to be his champion.  She had never felt anything like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of her married life, in which there had always been a quickly subduing pang; and she took it as a sign of new strength.

“Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!” said Celia, when Sir James was gone out of the room.  “And you don’t see anything you look at, Arthur or anything.  You are going to do something uncomfortable, I know.  Is it all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?” Celia had been used to watch her sister with expectation.

“Yes, dear, a great many things have happened,” said Dodo, in her full tones.

“I wonder what,” said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning forward upon them.

“Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth,” said Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.

“Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?” said Celia, a little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.

But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange, and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution until she descended at her own door.

CHAPTER LXXVIII.

    “Would it were yesterday and I i’ the grave,
     With her sweet faith above for monument”

Rosamond and Will stood motionless—­they did not know how long—­ he looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking towards him with doubt.  It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as gratification from what had just happened.  Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were.  She knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used to imagining other people’s states of mind except as a material cut into shape by her own wishes; and she believed in her own power to soothe or subdue.  Even Tertius, that most perverse of men, was always subdued in the long-run:  events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond would have said now, as she did before her marriage, that she never gave up what she had set her mind on.