hand on Deronda's arm, and looked at him with that joy of the hectic
patient which pierces us to sadness--"there is nothing to wail in the
withering of my body. The work will be the better done. Once I said the
work of this beginning was mine, I am born to do it. Well, I shall do
it. I shall live in you. I shall live in you."

His grasp had become convulsive in its force, and Deronda, agitated as
he had never been before--the certainty that this was Mirah's brother
suffusing his own strange relation to Mordecai with a new solemnity and
tenderness--felt his strong young heart beating faster and his lips
paling. He shrank from speech. He feared, in Mordecai's present state
of exaltation (already an alarming strain on his feeble frame), to
utter a word of revelation about Mirah. He feared to make an answer
below that high pitch of expectation which resembled a flash from a
dying fire, making watchers fear to see it die the faster. His dominant
impulse was to do as he had once done before: he laid his firm, gentle
hand on the hand that grasped him. Mordecai's, as if it had a soul of
its own--for he was not distinctly willing to do what he did--relaxed
its grasp, and turned upward under Deronda's. As the two palms met and
pressed each other Mordecai recovered some sense of his surroundings,
and said--

"Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer."

And in fact they parted at Cohen's door without having spoken to each
other again--merely with another pressure of the hands.

Deronda felt a weight on him which was half joy, half anxiety. The joy
of finding in Mirah's brother a nature even more than worthy of that
relation to her, had the weight of solemnity and sadness; the reunion
of brother and sister was in reality the first stage of a supreme
parting--like that farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last
glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow. Then there
was the weight of anxiety about the revelation of the fact on both
sides, and the arrangements it would be desirable to make beforehand. I
suppose we should all have felt as Deronda did, without sinking into
snobbishness or the notion that the primal duties of life demand a
morning and an evening suit, that it was an admissible desire to free
Mirah's first meeting with her brother from all jarring outward
conditions. His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded relationship
of the other Cohens, notwithstanding their good nature, made him
resolve