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.
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