ook about him and see whether the neighborhood
would suit him to live in. He had certainly had a few debts to pay
more than he expected, but the two hundred pounds were not gone yet: a
cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present.
What he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick and family, and
know all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so much attached.
By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay. This time Raffles
declined to be "seen off the premises," as he expressed it--declined to
quit Middlemarch under Bulstrode's eyes. He meant to go by coach the
next day--if he chose.

Bulstrode felt himself helpless. Neither threats nor coaxing could
avail: he could not count on any persistent fear nor on any promise.
On the contrary, he felt a cold certainty at his heart that
Raffles--unless providence sent death to hinder him--would come back
to Middlemarch before long. And that certainty was a terror.

It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary: he
was in danger only of seeing disclosed to the judgment of his neighbors
and the mournful perception of his wife certain facts of his past life
which would render him an object of scorn and an opprobrium of the
religion with which he had diligently associated himself. The terror
of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over
that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in
general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a
zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man
to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened
wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn
preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose
from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing
shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the
pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day,
without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and
fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life
coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look
through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs
on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees The
successive events inward and outward were there in one vi