We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.  Poor Lydgate was inwardly groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it.  It seemed to him this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation:  he dreaded Lydgate’s unsuspecting good-will:  he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.

CHAPTER LXXX.

       “Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
        The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
        Nor know we anything so fair
        As is the smile upon thy face;
        Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
        And fragrance in thy footing treads;
        Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
    And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. 
                                        —­WORDSWORTH:  Ode to Duty.

When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had promised to go and dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt.  There was a frequent interchange of visits between her and the Farebrother family, which enabled her to say that she was not at all lonely at the Manor, and to resist for the present the severe prescription of a lady companion.  When she reached home and remembered her engagement, she was glad of it; and finding that she had still an hour before she could dress for dinner, she walked straight to the schoolhouse and entered into a conversation with the master and mistress about the new bell, giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions, and getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy.  She paused on her way back to talk to old Master Bunney who was putting in some garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the result of sixty years’ experience as to soils—­namely, that if your soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to make it all of a mummy, why then—­

Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late, she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than was necessary.  That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like another White of Selborne, having continually something new to tell of his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not to torment; and he had just set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets of the village in general, and to walk at large as sacred animals.  The evening went by cheerfully till after tea, Dorothea talking more than usual and dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae, and for aught we know may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenly some inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody’s attention.