will find your life growing like a plant."

Gwendolen turned her eyes on him with the look of one athirst toward
the sound of unseen waters. Deronda felt the look as if she had been
stretching her arms toward him from a forsaken shore. His voice took an
affectionate imploringness when he said--

"This sorrow, which has cut down to the root, has come to you while you
are so young--try to think of it not as a spoiling of your life, but as
a preparation for it. Let it be a preparation----" Any one overhearing
his tones would have thought he was entreating for his own happiness.
"See! you have been saved from the worst evils that might have come
from your marriage, which you feel was wrong. You have had a vision of
injurious, selfish action--a vision of possible degradation; think that
a severe angel, seeing you along the road of error, grasped you by the
wrist and showed you the horror of the life you must avoid. And it has
come to you in your spring-time. Think of it as a preparation. You can,
you will, be among the best of women, such as make others glad that
they were born."

The words were like the touch of a miraculous hand to Gwendolen.
Mingled emotions streamed through her frame with a strength that seemed
the beginning of a new existence, having some new power or other which
stirred in her vaguely. So pregnant is the divine hope of moral
recovery with the energy that fulfills it. So potent in us is the
infused action of another soul, before which we bow in complete love.
But the new existence seemed inseparable from Deronda: the hope seemed
to make his presence permanent. It was not her thought, that he loved
her, and would cling to her--a thought would have tottered with
improbability; it was her spiritual breath. For the first time since
that terrible moment on the sea a flush rose and spread over her cheek,
brow and neck, deepened an instant or two, and then gradually
disappeared. She did not speak.

Deronda advanced and put out his hand, saying, "I must not weary you."

She was startled by the sense that he was going, and put her hand in
his, still without speaking.

"You look ill yet--unlike yourself," he added, while he held her hand.

"I can't sleep much," she answered, with some return of her dispirited
manner. "Things repeat themselves in me so. They come back--they will
all come back," she ended, shudderingly, a chill fear threatening her.

"By degrees they will be less insistent," said Deronda. H