Gwendolen, beating her foot on the
ground with returning agitation. "I am frightened at everything. I am
frightened at myself. When my blood is fired I can do daring
things--take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself." She was
looking at nothing outside her; but her eyes were directed toward the
window, away from Deronda, who, with quick comprehension said--

"Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of
increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. Fixed meditation may
do a great deal toward defining our longing or dread. We are not always
in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our
memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our
tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing.
It may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold
of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision."
Deronda uttered each sentence more urgently; he felt as if he were
seizing a faint chance of rescuing her from some indefinite danger.

"Yes, I know; I understand what you mean," said Gwendolen in her loud
whisper, not turning her eyes, but lifting up her small gloved hand and
waving it in deprecation of the notion that it was easy to obey that
advice. "But if feelings rose--there are some feelings--hatred and
anger--how can I be good when they keep rising? And if there came a
moment when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer----" She broke
off, and with agitated lips looked at Deronda, but the expression on
his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the
baffling difficulty of discerning, that what he had been urging on her
was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst
of her habitual emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his
limbs were bound. The pained compassion which was spread over his
features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any
she had felt before, and in a changed and imploring tone she said--

"I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You _can_ help me. I will think of
everything. I will try. Tell me--it will not be a pain to you that I
have dared to speak of my trouble to you? You began it, you know, when
you rebuked me." There was a melancholy smile on her lips as she said
that, but she added more entreatingly, "It will not be a pain to you?"

"Not if it does anything to save you from an evil to come," said
D