There was no reason why this should end any more than a merry-go-round; but it was at last interrupted by the opening of the door and the announcement of Miss Noble.

The little old lady, whose bonnet hardly reached Dorothea’s shoulder, was warmly welcomed, but while her hand was being pressed she made many of her beaver-like noises, as if she had something difficult to say.

“Do sit down,” said Dorothea, rolling a chair forward.  “Am I wanted for anything?  I shall be so glad if I can do anything.”

“I will not stay,” said Miss Noble, putting her hand into her small basket, and holding some article inside it nervously; “I have left a friend in the churchyard.”  She lapsed into her inarticulate sounds, and unconsciously drew forth the article which she was fingering.  It was the tortoise-shell lozenge-box, and Dorothea felt the color mounting to her cheeks.

“Mr. Ladislaw,” continued the timid little woman.  “He fears he has offended you, and has begged me to ask if you will see him for a few minutes.”

Dorothea did not answer on the instant:  it was crossing her mind that she could not receive him in this library, where her husband’s prohibition seemed to dwell.  She looked towards the window.  Could she go out and meet him in the grounds?  The sky was heavy, and the trees had begun to shiver as at a coming storm.  Besides, she shrank from going out to him.

“Do see him, Mrs. Casaubon,” said Miss Noble, pathetically; “else I must go back and say No, and that will hurt him.”

“Yes, I will see him,” said Dorothea.  “Pray tell him to come.”

What else was there to be done?  There was nothing that she longed for at that moment except to see Will:  the possibility of seeing him had thrust itself insistently between her and every other object; and yet she had a throbbing excitement like an alarm upon her—­ a sense that she was doing something daringly defiant for his sake.

When the little lady had trotted away on her mission, Dorothea stood in the middle of the library with her hands falling clasped before her, making no attempt to compose herself in an attitude of dignified unconsciousness.  What she was least conscious of just then was her own body:  she was thinking of what was likely to be in Will’s mind, and of the hard feelings that others had had about him.  How could any duty bind her to hardness?  Resistance to unjust dispraise had mingled with her feeling for him from the very first, and now in the rebound of her heart after her anguish the resistance was stronger than ever.  “If I love him too much it is because he has been used so ill:”—­there was a voice within her saying this to some imagined audience in the library, when the door was opened, and she saw Will before her.