When Good Men Fall Together — Middlemarch

After anodyne quiet, Lydgate finds Dorothea's letter on the table and learns she called herself while he was out. Will arrives; Lydgate is surprised, cites Rosamond's nervous shock, and calls himself an unlucky devil on a worse ledge of purgatory without knowing Will came that morning and left a scene behind him.

Will evades, hears his name mixed with Bulstrode disclosures and jokes about plotting murder, but will not say he refused Bulstrode's money while Lydgate accepted it. Lydgate praises Dorothea as the one who disbelieved suspicions, then stops when Will's face changes; both pity each other in partial silence.

Lydgate speaks of London with resigned smile; Will sees himself sliding into pleasureless yielding, dreads obligation after his cruelty to Rosamond, and feels the perilous margin of passively watching one's future self consent to shabby achievement.

Eliot stages two men on the edge of different falls: the doctor bound by debt and marriage, the artist bound by pride and love he cannot name while Rosamond lies upstairs in hysterical quiet. Dorothy should read LXXIX as the visit that could have cleared suspicion yet leaves both men more alone with what they will not say aloud before Dorothea's second walk changes the hearth.