Dorothea draws closer to Casaubon again after he learns of his illness in a scene that tests whether compassion can survive disappointment. His grief and reserve make her feel shut out; she turns that hurt into anger and considers remaining apart. Yet as she recalls the pain his illness and the possible arrest of his work have caused him, she relinquishes the impulse to punish him. Waiting for him in the darkness, she reaches again for the hand of a husband she has neither ceased to love nor learned to understand.

The encounter in the garden

Dorothea knows that Tertius Lydgate has ridden away and steps into the garden intending to go to her husband at once. She hesitates, afraid that approaching him will feel like an intrusion. The intensity of her wish to comfort him is sharpened by the memory of how often her ardor has met with refusal; thwarted energy settles into dread. She wanders among the nearer clumps of trees until she sees Casaubon approaching, then goes towards him.

Her gesture is immediate and intimate: she passes her hand through his arm. His glance is cold, and he keeps his own hands behind him, allowing her arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid one. The physical contrast makes his reserve palpable. To Dorothea, his unresponsive hardness is horrible—not because he openly rejects her, but because the small, ordinary failure of tenderness seems to waste the possibility of happiness between them.

Withdrawal and anger

Dorothea does not draw her arm away or speak. Casaubon silently directs his steps towards the house, and at the glass door on the eastern side she withdraws her arm and lingers on the matting so that he can enter freely. He shuts himself in the library, alone with his sorrow. Dorothea goes upstairs to her boudoir, where the open bow-window admits the afternoon light and the long shadows of the lime-trees in the avenue. She does not attend to the scene; she sits in the sun-rays, unable to distinguish outward discomfort from inward misery.

Anger rises in place of tears. Dorothea asks herself what she has done to deserve such treatment, and concludes that Casaubon never knows or cares what is in her mind. She fears that he wishes he had never married her. As she hears herself, however, she becomes still and sees the distance between them with painful clarity: they walk apart, and she is left surveying him from outside his inner life. If he had drawn her towards him, she thinks, she would not have judged whether he was worth living for; she would simply have felt him part of her own life.

That recognition does not immediately restore tenderness. Dorothea bitterly assigns him the blame and questions whether she was foolish to believe in his worthiness. She sees the cost of her efforts to please him: she has waited anxiously on his glances and confined her best self, visiting it only in secret. The scene exposes a reversal in her response to him. Pity, which had sustained her devotion, is temporarily overthrown by resentment, and she considers withholding her company until she can speak without interruption.

The struggle to return

As evening deepens, Dorothea asks for nothing to be brought to her and tells her attendant not to disturb her again. Her inward struggle continues to change. At first she is moved towards a figurative blow; gradually she begins to master the wish to strike back. The narrative places this restraint alongside the force of anger: overcoming the desire to hurt another requires an energy as serious as the impulse itself.

The thought that had sent her into the garden returns as a reproach to her anger. She had believed that Casaubon was asking whether his work might have to stop, and that the answer had pierced him. Remembering his grief, she cannot sustain a view in which only her own injury matters. Her return to compassion is neither effortless nor sentimental. It costs her imagined sorrows and silent cries, as she tries to become a source of mercy for the suffering she has recognized in him.

When the house is quiet and she knows Casaubon usually goes to bed, Dorothea opens her door and waits outside in the darkness. She intends to meet him as he comes upstairs with a light in his hand; if he does not appear soon, she may go down to him herself, even at the risk of another pang. She tells herself not to expect anything else from him again, but still chooses to approach him. Her decision is therefore not founded on confidence that he will answer her affection, but on a renewed commitment to offer it.

A fragile reconciliation

The library door opens, and the light advances slowly up the carpeted staircase. Casaubon appears more haggard than before and starts slightly when he sees Dorothea waiting. She looks up at him beseechingly without speaking. He addresses her by name and asks whether she was waiting for him. Dorothea answers that she did not wish to disturb him, making clear that her earlier withdrawal had not been a final abandonment.

Casaubon invites her to come with him and remarks that she is young and need not extend her life by watching. His quiet melancholy reaches her as something kind. Dorothea feels the thankfulness of someone who has narrowly avoided hurting a vulnerable creature; she puts her hand into his, and they walk together along the broad corridor. The movement from an arm pressed against his rigid one to her hand placed in his is small but decisive. It does not erase the distance between them or settle the hurts she has named. It makes a limited, bodily reconciliation possible after anger has threatened to harden into estrangement.

The scene’s significance

The episode turns on gestures and withheld words: a hand offered in the garden, an arm withdrawn at the house door, a library door shut, and, later, a hand taken in the dark. Casaubon does not explain himself or ask forgiveness, and Dorothea does not voice the full charge she has formed against him. Instead, the change occurs through her inward reconsideration and their restrained exchange on the stairs. The scene makes the marriage’s emotional imbalance visible without reducing it to a single quarrel: Dorothea longs for mutual closeness, while Casaubon’s grief and reserve leave her to infer what he feels.

Dorothea’s return is an act of sympathy that includes, rather than denies, her anger. She has recognized how his coldness wounds her, yet she also remembers that the possible end of his work has brought him sorrow. The scene thus presents care as a choice made under imperfect understanding, not as proof that the couple’s difficulties have vanished. Her hand in his offers a temporary passage across their solitude, while the quietness of their reconciliation preserves the fragility of that passage.