This shifting of standards puzzles the clergyman; but when he learns that the editor has a letter written by Beata which might incriminate both Rebekka and himself, then he begins to see his false position, and also the peril of playing with such fire. Slowly he is undeceived as to Rebekka's character. He catches her eavesdropping, and is stunned by her confession of treachery and murder. In the last act the bewildered man hears another upsetting disclosure. On the eve of her departure for the north, and after Rosmer has made his peace with Kroll and his party, she blurts forth the fatal truth. She has long loved Rosmer, and that love, at first passionate, selfish, impelled her to crime; with the months came a great peace, and then, like a palimpsest showing through the corrupt training of her girlhood, her conscience asserted itself. Rosmersholm and the Rosmer ideals had begun their work of denudation and disintegration. If the Rosmer ideal ennobled, it also killed happiness, which really means that, the sting of her wickedness being extracted, the woman was powerless for good or for evil; she no longer had the inclination to descend into the infernal gulf of crime, nor had she the will power to live the higher life. The common notion is that Rebekka is converted by pure love. It is a suspiciously sudden conversion. Rather let us incline to the belief that the main-spring of her will was broken, even before Rosmer offered her marriage. Of a cerebral type, like the majority of Ibsen's heroines, the violence of her passion once cooled, she had nothing to make her life worth while. Her confession calmed her nerves; after it, like many notorious criminals, she was indifferent to the outcome. In Rosmer the old churchly leaven began to work. Horrified by Rebekka's revelation, as disappointed in her as she was in him, he demanded why she had confessed her love. To give you back your innocence, she replied. Does he wish for another test?--then make one, she will not fear it. Straightway the stern priest awakens in him; he has never cast off, despite his blasphemies, the yoke of the Lord. This woman that he loves was the murderess of his wife Beata. An eye for an eye! Expiation must be by blood sacrifice! Does she dare go out on the bridge across the stream and--? Rebekka, worn out, sick of the vileness of her soul, weary of this life which can now promise nothing, eagerly assents. She will go, and go alone. Soon the last tremor of manhood is felt in the superstitious brain of Rosmer. No, she shall not go alone. Together as man and wife, sealed by a kiss, they will go to eternity. And then the male moral coward and the female companion of his destiny walk calmly to their fate. The housekeeper watches them fall in the raging pool, and she is not as much surprised as one would imagine. "The dead wife has taken them," she exclaims, for, like every one at Rosmersholm, she believes in the triumph of the dead.