s.

"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.

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 in