ere is no objection, I suppose, to
their knowing that you and I meet in private?"

"None," said Mordecai. "But the days I wait now are longer than the
years of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the
half. My hope abides in you."

"I will be faithful," said Deronda--he could not have left those words
unuttered. "I will come the first evening I can after seven: on
Saturday or Monday, if possible. Trust me."

He put out his ungloved hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, seemed to
feel a new instreaming of confidence, and he said with some recovered
energy--"This is come to pass, and the rest will come."

That was their good-bye.

BOOK VI---REVELATIONS

CHAPTER XLI.

"This, too is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: 'It is a
part of probability that many improbable things will happen.'"
--ARISTOTLE: _Poetics_.

Imagine the conflict in a mind like Deronda's given not only to feel
strongly but to question actively, on the evening after the interview
with Mordecai. To a young man of much duller susceptibilities the
adventure might have seemed enough out of the common way to divide his
thoughts; but it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with the usual
reaction of his intellect he began to examine the grounds of his
emotion, and consider how far he must resist its guidance. The
consciousness that he was half dominated by Mordecai's energetic
certitude, and still more by his fervent trust, roused his alarm. It
was his characteristic bias to shrink from the moral stupidity of
valuing lightly what had come close to him, and of missing blindly in
his own life of to-day the crisis which he recognized as momentous and
sacred in the historic life of men. If he had read of this incident as
having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine,
Cairo, to some man young as himself, dissatisfied with his neutral
life, and wanting some closer fellowship, some more special duty to
give him ardor for the possible consequences of his work, it would have
appeared to him quite natural that the incident should have created a
deep impression on that far-off man, whose clothing and action would
have been seen in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us
through its more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own
agitated feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white
tie, and lived among people who might laugh at his owning any
conscienc