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.

"I _should_ like to do something for my brother's family, Nicholas; and
I think we are bound to make some amends to Rosamond and her husband.
Walter says Mr. Lydgate must leave the town, and his practice is almost
good for nothing, and they have very little left to settle anywhere
with. I would rather do without something for ourselves, to make some
amends to my poor brother's family."

Mrs. Bulstrode did not wish to go nearer to the facts than in the