In his dark eyes
and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the
fulness of contemplative thought--the mind not searching, but
beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled with what is behind it.

Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close
to the sofa and opposite her husband's face.

"Is that enough music for you, my lord?" she said, folding her hands
before her and putting on a little air of meekness.

"Yes, dear, if you are tired," said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes
and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving. Rosamond's presence
at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake,
and her woman's instinct in this matter was not dull.

"What is absorbing you?" she said, leaning forward and bringing her
face nearer to his.

He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.

"I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three
hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy."

"I can't guess," said Rosamond, shaking her head. "We used to play at
guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon's, but not anatomists."

"I'll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get
to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from
graveyards and places of execution."

"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, "I am
very glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find
some less horrible way than that."

"No, he couldn't," said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much
notice of her answer. "He could only get a complete skeleton by
snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and
burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of
night."

"I hope he is not one of your great heroes," said Rosamond, half
playfully, half anxiously, "else I shall have you getting up in the
night to go to St. Peter's churchyard. You know how angry you told me
the people were about Mrs. Goby. You have enemies enough already."

"So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch
are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon
Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen
was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the
facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of
them."

"And what happened to