Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into some new terrible existence.  She had no sense of chill resolute repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under Lydgate’s most stormy displeasure:  all her sensibility was turned into a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a lash never experienced before.  What another nature felt in opposition to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness.  When Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery:  her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them.  If it had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very cheap.

Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity.  He had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless.  He knew that he was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.

After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still.  At length Will, seeming to bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.  He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality; he felt checked and stultified in his anger.  He walked towards the mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for—­he hardly knew what.  The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a caressing friendship he had found. calamity seated there—­he had had suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as within it.  And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with slow pincers:—­that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her heart.  But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on Rosamond’s blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart, in silence; Will’s face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond’s by a mute misery.  The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken her:  her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.