are not in any way guilty. Mr.
Farebrother would believe me, and my uncle, and Sir James Chettam. Nay, there
are persons in Middlemarch to whom I could go; although they don't know much of
me, they would believe me. They would know that I could have no other motive
than truth and justice. I would take any pains to clear you. I have very little
to do. There is nothing better that I can do in the world.«
    Dorothea's voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she would do,
might have been almost taken as a proof that she could do it effectively. The
searching tenderness of her woman's tones seemed made for a defence against
ready accusers. Lydgate did not stay to think that she was Quixotic: he gave
himself up, for the first time in his life, to the exquisite sense of leaning
entirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve. And he told
her everything, from the time when, under the pressure of his difficulties, he
unwillingly made his first application to Bulstrode; gradually, in the relief of
speaking, getting into a more thorough utterance of what had gone on in his mind
- entering fully into the fact that his treatment of the patient was opposed to
the dominant practice, into his doubts at the last, his ideal of medical duty,
and his uneasy consciousness that the acceptance of the money had made some
difference in his private inclination and professional behaviour, though not in
his fulfilment of any publicly recognised obligation.
    »It has come to my knowledge since,« he added, »that Hawley sent some one to
examine the housekeeper at Stone Court, and she said that she gave the patient
all the opium in the phial I left, as well as a good deal of brandy. But that
would not have been opposed to ordinary prescriptions, even of first-rate men.
The suspicions against me had no hold there: they are grounded on the knowledge
that I took money, that Bulstrode had strong motives for wishing the man to die,
and that he gave me the money as a bribe to concur in some malpractices or other
against the patient - that in any case I accepted a bribe to hold my tongue.
They are just the suspicions that cling the most obstinately, because they lie
in people's inclination and can never be disproved. How my orders came to be
disobeyed is a question to which I don't know the answer. It is still possible
that Bulstrode was innocent of any criminal intention - even possible that