till she said in a whisper, "I will try."

"I shall be more with you than I used to be," Deronda said with gentle
urgency, releasing her hands and rising from his kneeling posture. "If
we had been much together before, we should have felt our differences
more, and seemed to get farther apart. Now we can perhaps never see
each other again. But our minds may get nearer."

Gwendolen said nothing, but rose too, automatically. Her withered look
of grief, such as the sun often shines on when the blinds are drawn up
after the burial of life's joy, made him hate his own words: they
seemed to have the hardness of easy consolation in them. She felt that
he was going, and that nothing could hinder it. The sense of it was
like a dreadful whisper in her ear, which dulled all other
consciousness; and she had not known that she was rising.

Deronda could not speak again. He thought that they must part in
silence, but it was difficult to move toward the parting, till she
looked at him with a sort of intention in her eyes, which helped him.
He advanced to put out his hand silently, and when she had placed hers
within it, she said what her mind had been laboring with--

"You have been very good to me. I have deserved nothing. I will
try--try to live. I shall think of you. What good have I been? Only
harm. Don't let me be harm to _you_. It shall be the better for me--"

She could not finish. It was not that she was sobbing, but that the
intense effort with which she spoke made her too tremulous. The burden
of that difficult rectitude toward him was a weight her frame tottered
under.

She bent forward to kiss his cheek, and he kissed hers. Then they
looked at each other for an instant with clasped hands, and he turned
away.

When he was quite gone, her mother came in and found her sitting
motionless.

"Gwendolen, dearest, you look very ill," she said, bending over her and
touching her cold hands.

"Yes, mamma. But don't be afraid. I am going to live," said Gwendolen,
bursting out hysterically.

Her mother persuaded her to go to bed, and watched by her. Through the
day and half the night she fell continually into fits of shrieking, but
cried in the midst of them to her mother, "Don't be afraid. I shall
live. I mean to live."

After all, she slept; and when she waked in the morning light, she
looked up fixedly at her mother and said tenderly, "Ah, poor mamma! You
have been sitting up with me. Don't be unhappy. I shall live. I