ick and Deronda. The little mother's
happy emotion in witnessing this meeting of brother and sister had
already won her to Mordecai, who seemed to her really to have more
dignity and refinement than she had felt obliged to believe in from
Deronda's account.

"See this dear lady!" said Mirah. "I was a stranger, a poor wanderer,
and she believed in me, and has treated me as a daughter. Please give
my brother your hand," she added, beseechingly, taking Mrs. Meyrick's
hand and putting it in Mordecai's, then pressing them both with her own
and lifting them to her lips.

"The Eternal Goodness has been with you," said Mordecai. "You have
helped to fulfill our mother's prayer."

"I think we will go now, shall we?--and return later," said Deronda,
laying a gentle pressure on Mrs. Meyrick's arm, and she immediately
complied. He was afraid of any reference to the facts about himself
which he had kept back from Mordecai, and he felt no uneasiness now in
the thought of the brother and sister being alone together.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

'Tis hard and ill-paid task to order all things beforehand by the rule
of our own security, as is well hinted by Machiavelli concerning
Caesar Borgia, who, saith he, had thought of all that might occur on
his father's death, and had provided against every evil chance save
only one: it had never come into his mind that when his father died,
his own death would quickly follow.

Grandcourt's importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly
passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and
social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and
his most careful biographer need not have read up on
Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household
suffrage, or even the last commercial panic. He glanced over the best
newspaper columns on these topics, and his views on them can hardly be
said to have wanted breadth, since he embraced all Germans, all
commercial men, and all voters liable to use the wrong kind of soap,
under the general epithet of "brutes;" but he took no action on these
much-agitated questions beyond looking from under his eyelids at any
man who mentioned them, and retaining a silence which served to shake
the opinions of timid thinkers.

But Grandcourt, within his own sphere of interest, showed some of the
qualities which have entered into triumphal diplomacy of the wildest
continental sort.

No