instead
of satisfied hatred, the dismay of guilt; instead of freedom, the palsy
of a new terror--a white dead face from which she was forever trying to
flee and forever held back. She remembered Deronda's words: they were
continually recurring in her thought--

"Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of
increasing your remorse. * * * Take your fear as a safeguard. It is
like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately
present to you."

And so it was. In Gwendolen's consciousness temptation and dread met
and stared like two pale phantoms, each seeing itself in the
other--each obstructed by its own image; and all the while her fuller
self beheld the apparitions and sobbed for deliverance from them.

Inarticulate prayers, no more definite than a cry, often swept out from
her into the vast silence, unbroken except by her husband's breathing
or the plash of the wave or the creaking of the masts; but if ever she
thought of definite help, it took the form of Deronda's presence and
words, of the sympathy he might have for her, of the direction he might
give her. It was sometimes after a white-lipped fierce-eyed temptation
with murdering fingers had made its demon-visit that these best moments
of inward crying and clinging for rescue would come to her, and she
would lie with wide-open eyes in which the rising tears seemed a
blessing, and the thought, "I will not mind if I can keep from getting
wicked," seemed an answer to the indefinite prayer.

So the days passed, taking with them light breezes beyond and about the
Balearic Isles, and then to Sardinia, and then with gentle change
persuading them northward again toward Corsica. But this floating,
gentle-wafted existence, with its apparently peaceful influences, was
becoming as bad as a nightmare to Gwendolen.

"How long are we to be yachting?" she ventured to ask one day after
they had been touching at Ajaccio, and the mere fact of change in going
ashore had given her a relief from some of the thoughts which seemed
now to cling about the very rigging of the vessel, mix with the air in
the red silk cabin below, and make the smell of the sea odious.

"What else should we do?" said Grandcourt. "I'm not tired of it. I
don't see why we shouldn't stay out any length of time. There's less to
bore one in this way. And where would you go to? I'm sick of foreign
places. And we shall have enough of Ryelands. Would you rather be at
Ryeland