ng by going on the recruiting sergeant's plan."

When the wherry was approaching Blackfriars Bridge, where Deronda meant
to land, it was half-past four, and the gray day was dying gloriously,
its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a
wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental
calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a
luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the
sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from
blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory.

Feeling well heated by this time, Deronda gave up the oar and drew over
him again his Inverness cape. As he lifted up his head while fastening
the topmost button his eyes caught a well-remembered face looking
toward him over the parapet of the bridge--brought out by the western
light into startling distinctness and brilliancy--an illuminated type
of bodily emaciation and spiritual eagerness. It was the face of
Mordecai, who also, in his watch toward the west, had caught sight of
the advancing boat, and had kept it fast within his gaze, at first
simply because it was advancing, then with a recovery of impressions
that made him quiver as with a presentiment, till at last the nearing
figure lifted up its face toward him--the face of his visions--and then
immediately, with white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again.

For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should recognize and await him, had
lost no time before signaling, and the answer came straightway.
Mordecai lifted his cap and waved it--feeling in that moment that his
inward prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles, incongruities, all melted
into the sense of completion with which his soul was flooded by this
outward satisfaction of his longing. His exultation was not widely
different from that of the experimenter, bending over the first
stirrings of change that correspond to what in the fervor of
concentrated prevision his thought has foreshadowed. The prefigured
friend had come from the golden background, and had signaled to him:
this actually was: the rest was to be.

In three minutes Deronda had landed, had paid his boatman, and was
joining Mordecai, whose instinct it was to stand perfectly still and
wait for him.

"I was very glad to see you standing here," said Deronda, "for I was
intending to go on to the book-shop and look for you again. I was there
yesterday--perhaps they m