Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication of feeling.  There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode, but also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing house with Mr. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined her to desire that the mildest view of his character should be the true one, but on the other, made her the more afraid of seeming to palliate his culpability.  Again, the late alliance of her family with the Tollers had brought her in connection with the best circle, which gratified her in every direction except in the inclination to those serious views which she believed to be the best in another sense.  The sharp little woman’s conscience was somewhat troubled in the adjustment of these opposing “bests,” and of her griefs and satisfactions under late events, which were likely to humble those who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on her old friend whose faults she would have preferred seeing on a background of prosperity.

Poor Mrs. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the oncoming tread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret uneasiness which had always been present in her since the last visit of Raffles to The Shrubs.  That the hateful man had come ill to Stone Court, and that her husband had chosen to remain there and watch over him, she allowed to be explained by the fact that Raffles had been employed and aided in earlier-days, and that this made a tie of benevolence towards him in his degraded helplessness; and she had been since then innocently cheered by her husband’s more hopeful speech about his own health and ability to continue his attention to business.  The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had brought him home ill from the meeting, and in spite of comforting assurances during the next few days, she cried in private from the conviction that her husband was not suffering from bodily illness merely, but from something that afflicted his mind.  He would not allow her to read to him, and scarcely to sit with him, alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet she suspected that in shutting himself up in his private room he wanted to be busy with his papers.  Something, she felt sure, had happened.  Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in the dark.  Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth day after the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to church—­

“Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me:  I like to know the truth.  Has anything happened to Mr. Bulstrode?”

“Some little nervous shock,” said Lydgate, evasively.  He felt that it was not for him to make the painful revelation.

“But what brought it on?” said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly at him with her large dark eyes.

“There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms,” said Lydgate.  “Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people in proportion to the delicacy of their systems.  It is often impossible to account for the precise moment of an attack—­or rather, to say why the strength gives way at a particular moment.”