wrong as well as I," he added, smiling at Mordecai. "You
thought that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah."

"I undervalued her heart," said Mordecai. "She is capable of rejoicing
that another's plant blooms though her own be withered."

"Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each
other," said Mirah, with a tinge of merriment in her smile.

"What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?" said
Deronda, mischievously--a little provoked that she had taken kindly at
once to people who had caused him so much prospective annoyance on her
account.

Mirah looked at him with a slight surprise for a moment, and then said,
"He is not a bad man--I think he would never forsake any one." But when
she uttered the words she blushed deeply, and glancing timidly at
Mordecai, turned away to some occupation. Her father was in her mind,
and this was a subject on which she and her brother had a painful
mutual consciousness. "If he should come and find us!" was a thought
which to Mirah sometimes made the street daylight as shadowy as a
haunted forest where each turn screened for her an imaginary apparition.

Deronda felt what was her involuntary allusion, and understood the
blush. How could he be slow to understand feelings which now seemed
nearer than ever to his own? for the words of his mother's letter
implied that his filial relation was not to be freed from painful
conditions; indeed, singularly enough that letter which had brought his
mother nearer as a living reality had thrown her into more remoteness
for his affections. The tender yearning after a being whose life might
have been the worse for not having his care and love, the image of a
mother who had not had all her dues, whether of reverence or
compassion, had long been secretly present with him in his observation
of all the women he had come near. But it seemed now that this
picturing of his mother might fit the facts no better than his former
conceptions about Sir Hugo. He wondered to find that when this mother's
very hand-writing had come to him with words holding her actual
feeling, his affections had suddenly shrunk into a state of comparative
neutrality toward her. A veiled figure with enigmatic speech had thrust
away that image which, in spite of uncertainty, his clinging thought
had gradually modeled and made the possessor of his tenderness and
duteous longing. When he set off to Genoa, the interest really
uppermost in h