and vary his occupations. With a happy
concurrence of circumstances, there is, as I said, no immediate danger
from that affection of the heart, which I believe to have been the
cause of his late attack. On the other hand, it is possible that the
disease may develop itself more rapidly: it is one of those eases in
which death is sometimes sudden. Nothing should be neglected which
might be affected by such an issue."

There was silence for a few moments, while Dorothea sat as if she had
been turned to marble, though the life within her was so intense that
her mind had never before swept in brief time over an equal range of
scenes and motives.

"Help me, pray," she said, at last, in the same low voice as before.
"Tell me what I can do."

"What do you think of foreign travel? You have been lately in Rome, I
think."

The memories which made this resource utterly hopeless were a new
current that shook Dorothea out of her pallid immobility.

"Oh, that would not do--that would be worse than anything," she said
with a more childlike despondency, while the tears rolled down.
"Nothing will be of any use that he does not enjoy."

"I wish that I could have spared you this pain," said Lydgate, deeply
touched, yet wondering about her marriage. Women just like Dorothea
had not entered into his traditions.

"It was right of you to tell me. I thank you for telling me the truth."

"I wish you to understand that I shall not say anything to enlighten
Mr. Casaubon himself. I think it desirable for him to know nothing
more than that he must not overwork himself, and must observe certain
rules. Anxiety of any kind would be precisely the most unfavorable
condition for him."

Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time?
unclasping her cloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her. He was
bowing and quitting her, when an impulse which if she had been alone
would have turned into a prayer, made her say with a sob in her voice--

"Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life and
death. Advise me. Think what I can do. He has been laboring all his
life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else.-- And I mind
about nothing else--"

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by
this involuntary appeal--this cry from soul to soul, without other
consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same
embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illumin