She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will’s coat-sleeve.

“Don’t touch me!” he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash, darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting.  He wheeled round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her, with the tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back, looking fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.

She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such as only Lydgate was used to interpret.  She became suddenly quiet and seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her shawl.  Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.

It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond with his anger.  It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting.  And yet—­how could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her?  He was fuming under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge:  he was dangerously poised, and Rosamond’s voice now brought the decisive vibration.  In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said—­

“You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference.”

“Go after her!” he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice.  “Do you think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to her again at more than a dirty feather?—­Explain!  How can a man explain at the expense of a woman?”

“You can tell her what you please,” said Rosamond with more tremor.

“Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you?  She is not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable—­ to believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you.”

He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees prey but cannot reach it.  Presently he burst out again—­

“I had no hope before—­not much—­of anything better to come.  But I had one certainty—­that she believed in me.  Whatever people had said or done about me, she believed in me.—­That’s gone!  She’ll never again think me anything but a paltry pretence—­ too nice to take heaven except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any devil’s change by the sly.  She’ll think of me as an incarnate insult to her, from the first moment we—­”

Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must not be thrown and shattered.  He found another vent for his rage by snatching up Rosamond’s words again, as if they were reptiles to be throttled and flung off.

“Explain!  Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell!  Explain my preference!  I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.  No other woman exists by the side of her.  I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.”