Goneril returns to Albany's palace and immediately senses something wrong. Oswald tells her: when informed of the French landing, Albany smiled; when told Goneril was coming, he said "The worse"; when told of Gloucester's treachery and Edmund's loyalty, he called Oswald a sot and said he had turned the wrong side out.
Goneril wastes no time. She sends Edmund back to Cornwall, pressing a token into his hand, giving him a kiss, and telling him she expects to hear from him soon with "a mistress's command": meaning she intends to replace Albany with Edmund as her effective military commander. Edmund's response: "Yours in the ranks of death." Then she speaks privately: "O, the difference of man and man! To thee a woman's services are due; my fool usurps my body." The fool she means is her husband.
Albany enters and the scene between husband and wife is direct. He tells her she is not worth the dust the wind blows in her face. "Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform'd?" He warns that if the heavens do not send visible spirits to tame these offences, humanity "must perforce prey on itself, like monsters of the deep."
Goneril's answer is contempt. She calls him "milk-liver'd," accuses him of cowardice while France invades, and dismisses his moral objections as foolishness. Albany replies: "See thyself, devil! Proper deformity seems not in the fiend / So horrid as in woman." He tells her the only thing stopping his hands is that she is a woman.
A messenger arrives. Cornwall is dead; killed by his own servant as he moved to take Gloucester's second eye. Albany reads this as divine justice: "This shows you are above, you justicers, that these our nether crimes so speedily can venge."
Goneril's aside is colder. Cornwall's death makes Regan a widow. A widow with Edmund nearby. The thought is unpleasant.
The messenger then answers Albany's question about where Edmund was during the blinding. He was the one who informed against his father. He left the house on purpose so the punishment could proceed without complication.
Albany: "Gloucester, I live to thank thee for the love thou show'dst the King, and to revenge thine eyes."
