I think I did not move. I kept my hands tight. It was long enough
for me to be glad, and yet to think it was no use--he would come up
again. And he _was_ come--farther off--the boat had moved. It was all
like lightning. 'The rope!' he called out in a voice--not his own--I
hear it now--and I stooped for the rope--I felt I must--I felt sure he
could swim, and he would come back whether or not, and I dreaded him.
That was in my mind--he would come back. But he was gone down again,
and I had the rope in my hand--no, there he was again--his face above
the water--and he cried again--and I held my hand, and my heart said,
'Die!'--and he sank; and I felt 'It is done--I am wicked, I am
lost!--and I had the rope in my hand--I don't know what I thought--I
was leaping away from myself--I would have saved him then. I was
leaping from my crime, and there it was--close to me as I fell--there
was the dead face--dead, dead. It can never be altered. That was what
happened. That was what I did. You know it all. It can never be
altered."

She sank back in her chair, exhausted with the agitation of memory and
speech. Deronda felt the burden on his spirit less heavy than the
foregoing dread. The word "guilty" had held a possibility of
interpretations worse than the fact; and Gwendolen's confession, for
the very reason that her conscience made her dwell on the determining
power of her evil thoughts, convinced him the more that there had been
throughout a counterbalancing struggle of her better will. It seemed
almost certain that her murderous thought had had no outward
effect--that, quite apart from it, the death was inevitable. Still, a
question as to the outward effectiveness of a criminal desire dominant
enough to impel even a momentary act, cannot alter our judgment of the
desire; and Deronda shrank from putting that question forward in the
first instance. He held it likely that Gwendolen's remorse aggravated
her inward guilt, and that she gave the character of decisive action to
what had been an inappreciably instantaneous glance of desire. But her
remorse was the precious sign of a recoverable nature; it was the
culmination of that self-disapproval which had been the awakening of a
new life within her; it marked her off from the criminals whose only
regret is failure in securing their evil wish. Deronda could not utter
one word to diminish that sacred aversion to her worst self--that
thorn-pressure which must come with the crowning of