with some hopefulness to pay three hundred per cent, in the form of
fourpence. However, Deronda's mind was busy with a prospective
arrangement for giving a furnished lodging some faint likeness to a
refined home by dismantling his own chambers of his best old books in
vellum, his easiest chair, and the bas-reliefs of Milton and Dante.

But was not Mirah to be there? What furniture can give such finish to a
room as a tender woman's face?--and is there any harmony of tints that
has such stirrings of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?
Here is one good, at least, thought Deronda, that comes to Mordecai
from his having fixed his imagination on me. He has recovered a perfect
sister, whose affection is waiting for him.

CHAPTER XLIV.

Fairy folk a-listening
Hear the seed sprout in the spring.
And for music to their dance
Hear the hedgerows wake from trance,
Sap that trembles into buds
Sending little rhythmic floods
Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
Thus all beauty that appears
Has birth as sound to finer sense
And lighter-clad intelligence.

And Gwendolen? She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was
thinking of her--often wondering what were his ideas "about things,"
and how his life was occupied. But a lap-dog would be necessarily at a
loss in framing to itself the motives and adventures of doghood at
large; and it was as far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's
life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that
he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her
horizon in the form of a twinkling star.

With all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was
inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his
thoughts than she actually possessed. They must be rather old and wise
persons who are not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about
themselves reflected in other minds; and Gwendolen, with her youth and
inward solitude, may be excused for dwelling on signs of special
interest in her shown by the one person who had impressed her with the
feeling of submission, and for mistaking the color and proportion of
those signs in the mind of Deronda.

Meanwhile, what would he tell her that she ought to do? "He said, I
must get more interest in others, and more knowledge, and that I must
care about the best things--but how am I to begin?" She wondered what
books he would tell her to take up to her ow