 said Lydgate, not quite knowing what he said. »I have occupied
you too long. Good-day.«
 

                                 Chapter LXVIII

 »What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on
 If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well?
 If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion
 Act as fair parts with ends as laudable?
 Which all this mighty volume of events
 The world, the universal map of deeds,
 Strongly controls, and proves from all descents,
 That the directest course still best succeeds.
 For should not grave and learn'd Experience
 That looks with the eyes of all the world beside,
 And with all ages holds intelligence,
 Go safer than Deceit without a guide!«
                                                             Daniel: Musophilus.
 
That change of plan and shifting of interest which Bulstrode stated or betrayed
in his conversation with Lydgate, had been determined in him by some severe
experience which he had gone through since the epoch of Mr. Larcher's sale, when
Raffles had recognised Will Ladislaw, and when the banker had in vain attempted
an act of restitution which might move Divine Providence to arrest painful
consequences.
    His certainty that Raffles, unless he were dead, would return to Middlemarch
before long, had been justified. On Christmas Eve he had reappeared at The
Shrubs. Bulstrode was at home to receive him, and hinder his communication with
the rest of the family, but he could not altogether hinder the circumstances of
the visit from compromising himself and alarming his wife. Raffles proved more
unmanageable than he had shown himself to be in his former appearances, his
chronic state of mental restlessness, the growing effect of habitual
intemperance, quickly shaking off every impression from what was said to him. He
insisted on staying in the house, and Bulstrode, weighing two sets of evils,
felt that this was at least not a worse alternative than his going into the
town. He kept him in his own room for the evening and saw him to bed, Raffles
all the while amusing himself with the annoyance he was causing this decent and
highly prosperous fellow-sinner, an amusement which he facetiously expressed as
sympathy with his friend's pleasure in entertaining a man who had been
serviceable to him, and who had not had all his earnings. There was a cunning
calculation under this noisy joking - a cool resolve to extract something the
handsomer from Bulstrode as payment for release from this new application of
torture. But his cunning had a little overcast its mark.
    Bulstrode was indeed more tortured than the coarse fibre of Raffles could
enable him to imagine. He had told his wife that he was simply taking care of
this wretched creature,
