It was Lydgate’s misfortune and Rosamond’s too, that his tenderness towards her, which was both an emotional prompting and a well-considered resolve, was inevitably interrupted by these outbursts of indignation either ironical or remonstrant.  She thought them totally unwarranted, and the repulsion which this exceptional severity excited in her was in danger of making the more persistent tenderness unacceptable.

“I see you do not wish me to go,” she said, with chill mildness; “why can you not say so, without that kind of violence?  I shall stay until you request me to do otherwise.”

Lydgate said no more, but went out on his rounds.  He felt bruised and shattered, and there was a dark line under his eyes which Rosamond had not seen before.  She could not bear to look at him.  Tertius had a way of taking things which made them a great deal worse for her.

CHAPTER LXX.

    Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
    And what we have been makes us what we are.”

Bulstrode’s first object after Lydgate had left Stone Court was to examine Raffles’s pockets, which he imagined were sure to carry signs in the shape of hotel-bills of the places he had stopped in, if he had not told the truth in saying that he had come straight from Liverpool because he was ill and had no money.  There were various bills crammed into his pocketbook, but none of a later date than Christmas at any other place, except one, which bore date that morning.  This was crumpled up with a hand-bill about a horse-fair in one of his tail-pockets, and represented the cost of three days’ stay at an inn at Bilkley, where the fair was held—­ a town at least forty miles from Middlemarch.  The bill was heavy, and since Raffles had no luggage with him, it seemed probable that he had left his portmanteau behind in payment, in order to save money for his travelling fare; for his purse was empty, and he had only a couple of sixpences and some loose pence in his pockets.

Bulstrode gathered a sense of safety from these indications that Raffles had really kept at a distance from Middlemarch since his memorable visit at Christmas.  At a distance and among people who were strangers to Bulstrode, what satisfaction could there be to Raffles’s tormenting, self-magnifying vein in telling old scandalous stories about a Middlemarch banker?  And what harm if he did talk?  The chief point now was to keep watch over him as long as there was any danger of that intelligible raving, that unaccountable impulse to tell, which seemed to have acted towards Caleb Garth; and Bulstrode felt much anxiety lest some such impulse should come over him at the sight of Lydgate.  He sat up alone with him through the night, only ordering the housekeeper to lie down in her clothes, so as to be ready when he called her, alleging his own indisposition to sleep, and his anxiety to carry out the doctor’s orders.  He did carry them