“I beseech you to rest—not to stand,” said Deronda, as he approached her; and she obeyed, falling back into her chair again.
“Will you sit down near me?” she said. “I want to speak very low.”
She was in a large arm-chair, and he drew a small one near to her side. The action seemed to touch her peculiarly: turning her pale face full upon his, which was very near, she said, in the lowest audible tone, “You know I am a guilty woman?”
Deronda himself turned paler as he said, “I know nothing.” He did not dare to say more.
“He is dead.” She uttered this with the same undertoned decision.
“Yes,” said Deronda, in a mournful suspense which made him reluctant to speak.
“His face will not be seen above the water again,” said Gwendolen, in a tone that was not louder, but of a suppressed eagerness, while she held both her hands clenched.
“No.”
“Not by any one else—only by me—a dead face—I shall never get away from it.”
It was with an inward voice of desperate self-repression that she spoke these last words, while she looked away from Deronda toward something at a distance from her on the floor. She was seeing the whole event—her own acts included—through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror? Was she in a state of delirium into which there entered a sense of concealment and necessity for self-repression? Such thoughts glanced through Deronda as a sort of hope. But imagine the conflict of feeling that kept him silent. She was bent on confession, and he dreaded hearing her confession. Against his better will he shrank from the task that was laid on him: he wished, and yet rebuked the wish as cowardly, that she could bury her secrets in her own bosom. He was not a priest. He dreaded the weight of this woman’s soul flung upon his own with imploring dependence. But she spoke again, hurriedly, looking at him,