wn need. She unconsciously left intervals
in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said and
what she had only an inward vision of. Her next words came after such
an interval.

"That all made it so hard when I was forced to go in the boat. Because
when I saw you it was an unexpected joy, and I thought I could tell you
everything--about the locked-up drawer and what I had not told you
before. And if I had told you, and knew it was in your mind, it would
have less power over me. I hoped and trusted in that. For after all my
struggles and my crying, the hatred and rage, the temptation that
frightened me, the longing, the thirst for what I dreaded, always came
back. And that disappointment--when I was quite shut out from speaking
to you, and was driven to go in the boat--brought all the evil back, as
if I had been locked in a prison with it and no escape. Oh, it seems so
long ago now since I stepped into that boat! I could have given up
everything in that moment, to have the forked lightning for a weapon to
strike him dead."

Some of the compressed fierceness that she was recalling seemed to find
its way into her undertoned utterance. After a little silence she said,
with agitated hurry--

"If he were here again, what should I do? I cannot wish him here--and
yet I cannot bear his dead face. I was a coward. I ought to have borne
contempt. I ought to have gone away--gone and wandered like a beggar
rather than to stay to feel like a fiend. But turn where I would there
was something I could not bear. Sometimes I thought he would kill _me_
if I resisted his will. But now--his dead face is there, and I cannot
bear it."

Suddenly loosing Deronda's hand, she started up, stretching her arms to
their full length upward, and said with a sort of moan--

"I have been a cruel woman! What can _I_ do but cry for help? _I_ am
sinking. Die--die--you are forsaken--go down, go down into darkness.
Forsaken--no pity--_I_ shall be forsaken."

She sank in her chair again and broke into sobs. Even Deronda had no
place in her consciousness at that moment. He was completely unmanned.
Instead of finding, as he had imagined, that his late experience had
dulled his susceptibility to fresh emotion, it seemed that the lot of
this young creature, whose swift travel from her bright rash girlhood
into this agony of remorse he had had to behold in helplessness,
pierced him the deeper because it came close upon another sad
revelati