“I know, I know,” said Lydgate, deprecatingly.  “It was a fatal accident—­ a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more.”

Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, “I meant to do it.”

Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled:  moments seemed to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.

“There was a secret, then,” he said at last, even vehemently.  “He was brutal to you:  you hated him.”

“No! he wearied me; he was too fond:  he would live in Paris, and not in my country; that was not agreeable to me.”

“Great God!” said Lydgate, in a groan of horror.  “And you planned to murder him?”

“I did not plan:  it came to me in the play—­I meant to do it.”

Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he looked at her.  He saw this woman—­the first to whom he had given his young adoration—­amid the throng of stupid criminals.

“You are a good young man,” she said.  “But I do not like husbands.  I will never have another.”

Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Paris chambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him.  He was saved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and his belief that human life might be made better.  But he had more reason than ever for trusting his judgment, now that it was so experienced; and henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view of woman, entertaining no expectations but such as were justified beforehand.

No one in Middle march was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate’s past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did not come under their own senses.  Not only young virgins of that town, but gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for that instrumentality.  Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.

CHAPTER XVI.

    “All that in woman is adored
       In thy fair self I find—­
     For the whole sex can but afford
       The handsome and the kind.” 
                        —­SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.

The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and Lydgate heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode.  The banker was evidently a ruler, but there was an opposition party, and even among his supporters there were some who allowed it to be seen that their support was a compromise, and who frankly stated their impression that the general scheme of things, and especially the casualties of trade, required you to hold a candle to the devil.