But Will at last turned away from his portfolio and approached the

window again.

"I must go," he said, with that peculiar look of the eyes which

sometimes accompanies bitter feeling, as if they had been tired and

burned with gazing too close at a light.

"What shall you do in life?" said Dorothea, timidly. "Have your

intentions remained just the same as when we said good-by before?"

"Yes," said Will, in a tone that seemed to waive the subject as

uninteresting. "I shall work away at the first thing that offers. I

suppose one gets a habit of doing without happiness or hope."

"Oh, what sad words!" said Dorothea, with a dangerous tendency to sob.

Then trying to smile, she added, "We used to agree that we were alike

in speaking too strongly."

"I have not spoken too strongly now," said Will, leaning back against

the angle of the wall. "There are certain things which a man can only

go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other that

the best is over with him. This experience has happened to me while I

am very young--that is all. What I care more for than I can ever care

for anything else is absolutely forbidden to me--I don't mean merely

by being out of my reach, but forbidden me, even if it were within my

reach, by my own pride and honor--by everything I respect myself for.

Of course I shall go on living as a man might do who had seen heaven in

a trance."

Will paused, imagining that it would be impossible for Dorothea to

misunderstand this; indeed he felt that he was contradicting himself

and offending against his self-approval in speaking to her so plainly;

but still--it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her

that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind

of wooing.

But Dorothea's mind was rapidly going over the past with quite another

vision than his. The thought that she herself might be what Will most

cared for did throb through her an instant, but then came doubt: the

memory of the little they had lived through together turned pale and

shrank before the memory which suggested how much fuller might have

been the intercourse between Will and some one else with whom he had

had constant companionship. Everything he had said might refer to that

other relation, and whatever had passed between him and herself was

thoroughly explained by what she had always regarded as their simple

friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it by her husband's

injurious act. Dorothea stood silent, with her eyes cast down

dreamily, while images crowded upon her which left the sickening

certainty that Will was referring to Mrs. Lydgate. But why sickening?

He wanted her to know that here too his conduct should be above

suspicion.




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