When Honor Becomes a Trap — Middlemarch

After calming Harriet Bulstrode about her husband's faintness at the town meeting, Lydgate rides three miles out of Middlemarch to escape being violent within reach. He curses his arrival in the town, reads his whole career as preparation for a hateful fatality, and fears Rosamond's face will push him into unwarrantable rage before honor vents itself in solitude.

He reconstructs Bulstrode's dread of Raffles, the loan as binding obligation, and the world's belief that he winked at poison; yet vindication seems impossible because circumstances outweigh assertion and confession would darken Bulstrode further. The uneasy corner is whether he would have probed Raffles's death without the thousand pounds.

His scientific conscience now keeps debasing company with money obligation and selfish respects. Patients already desert him; black-balling has begun at the tables where he once stood as reformer. He resolves to stay, face calumny, and not howl against Bulstrode for acquittal, though he would return the money if he still held it.

Near home he dreads telling Rosamond and waits for events to disclose what they must soon share. Dorothy should read LXXIII as the doctor alone with coincidence turned conviction: motive read as murder, help read as bribe, and marriage still waiting in the house.