"I am going on immediately to Tipton," said Dorothea, rather haughtily.
"Good-by."
Sir James could say nothing as he accompanied her to the carriage. He
was altogether discontented with the result of a contrivance which had
cost him some secret humiliation beforehand.
Dorothea drove along between the berried hedgerows and the shorn
corn-fields, not seeing or hearing anything around. The tears came and
rolled down her cheeks, but she did not know it. The world, it seemed,
was turning ugly and hateful, and there was no place for her
trustfulness. "It is not true--it is not true!" was the voice within
her that she listened to; but all the while a remembrance to which
there had always clung a vague uneasiness would thrust itself on her
attention--the remembrance of that day when she had found Will Ladislaw
with Mrs. Lydgate, and had heard his voice accompanied by the piano.
"He said he would never do anything that I disapproved--I wish I could
have told him that I disapproved of that," said poor Dorothea,
inwardly, feeling a strange alternation between anger with Will and the
passionate defence of him. "They all try to blacken him before me; but
I will care for no pain, if he is not to blame. I always believed he
was good."--These were her last thoughts before she felt that the
carriage was passing under the archway of the lodge-gate at the Grange,
when she hurriedly pressed her handkerchief to her face and began to
think of her errands. The coachman begged leave to take out the horses
for half an hour as there was something wrong with a shoe; and
Dorothea, having the sense that she was going to rest, took off her
gloves and bonnet, while she was leaning against a statue in the
entrance-hall, and talking to the housekeeper. At last she said--
"I must stay here a little, Mrs. Kell. I will go into the library and
write you some memoranda from my uncle's letter, if you will open the
shutters for me."
"The shutters are open, madam," said Mrs. Kell, following Dorothea, who
had walked along as she spoke. "Mr. Ladislaw is there, looking for
something."
(Will had come to fetch a portfolio of his own sketches which he had
missed in the act of packing his movables, and did not choose to leave
behind.)
Dorothea's heart seemed to turn over as if it had had a blow, but she
was not perceptibly checked: in truth, the sense that Will was there
was for the moment all-satisfying to her, like the sight of something
precious that one has lost. When she reached the door she said to Mrs.
Kell--