do, and where you will find
her."

Sir Hugo held out a letter written on foreign paper, which Deronda
thrust into his breast-pocket, with a sense of relief that he was not
called on to read anything immediately. The emotion on Daniel's face
had gained on the baronet, and was visibly shaking his composure. Sir
Hugo found it difficult to say more. And Deronda's whole soul was
possessed by a question which was the hardest in the world to utter.
Yet he could not bear to delay it. This was a sacramental moment. If he
let it pass, he could not recover the influences under which it was
possible to utter the words and meet the answer. For some moments his
eyes were cast down, and it seemed to both as if thoughts were in the
air between them. But at last Deronda looked at Sir Hugo, and said,
with a tremulous reverence in his voice--dreading to convey indirectly
the reproach that affection had for years been stifling--

"Is my father also living?"

The answer came immediately in a low emphatic tone--"No."

In the mingled emotions which followed that answer it was impossible to
distinguish joy from pain.

Some new light had fallen on the past for Sir Hugo too in this
interview. After a silence in which Deronda felt like one whose creed
is gone before he has religiously embraced another, the baronet said,
in a tone of confession--

"Perhaps I was wrong, Dan, to undertake what I did. And perhaps I liked
it a little too well--having you all to myself. But if you have had any
pain which I might have helped, I ask you to forgive me."

"The forgiveness has long been there," said Deronda "The chief pain has
always been on account of some one else--whom I never knew--whom I am
now to know. It has not hindered me from feeling an affection for you
which has made a large part of all the life I remember."

It seemed one impulse that made the two men clasp each other's hand for
a moment.

BOOK VII.--THE MOTHER AND THE SON

CHAPTER L.

"If some mortal, born too soon,
Were laid away in some great trance--the ages
Coming and going all the while--till dawned
His true time's advent; and could then record
The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed,
Then I might tell more of the breath so light
Upon my eyelids, and the fingers warm
Among my hair. Youth is confused; yet never
So dull was I but, when that spirit passed,
I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns
A water-snake when fairies cr