passions bringing in their verdict of guilty, who pities Faithful?  That is a rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd—­ to be sure that what we are denounced for is solely the good in us.  The pitiable lot is that of the man who could not call himself a martyr even though he were to persuade himself that the men who stoned him were but ugly passions incarnate—­who knows that he is stoned, not for professing the Right, but for not being the man he professed to be.

This was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he made his preparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end his stricken life in that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces.  The duteous merciful constancy of his wife had delivered him from one dread, but it could not hinder her presence from being still a tribunal before which he shrank from confession and desired advocacy.  His equivocations with himself about the death of Raffles had sustained the conception of an Omniscience whom he prayed to, yet he had a terror upon him which would not let him expose them to judgment by a full confession to his wife:  the acts which he had washed and diluted with inward argument and motive, and for which it seemed comparatively easy to win invisible pardon—­what name would she call them by?  That she should ever silently call his acts Murder was what he could not bear.  He felt shrouded by her doubt:  he got strength to face her from the sense that she could not yet feel warranted in pronouncing that worst condemnation on him.  Some time, perhaps—­when he was dying—­he would tell her all:  in the deep shadow of that time, when she held his hand in the gathering darkness, she might listen without recoiling from his touch.  Perhaps:  but concealment had been the habit of his life, and the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of a deeper humiliation.

He was full of timid care for his wife, not only because he deprecated any harshness of judgment from her, but because he felt a deep distress at the sight of her suffering.  She had sent her daughters away to board at a school on the coast, that this crisis might be hidden from them as far as possible.  Set free by their absence from the intolerable necessity of accounting for her grief or of beholding their frightened wonder, she could live unconstrainedly with the sorrow that was every day streaking her hair with whiteness and making her eyelids languid.

“Tell me anything that you would like to have me do, Harriet,” Bulstrode had said to her; “I mean with regard to arrangements of property.  It is my intention not to sell the land I possess in this neighborhood, but to leave it to you as a safe provision.  If you have any wish on such subjects, do not conceal it from me.”

A few days afterwards, when she had returned from a visit to her brother’s, she began to speak to her husband on a subject which had for some time been in her mind.