memories which had begun to have a new interest for him on his
discovery of Mirah, and now, under the influence of Mordecai, had
become irresistibly dominant. He would have sealed his mind against
such constructions if it had been possible, and he had never yet fully
admitted to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai's
conviction: he inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter,
and that wishing was folly--nay, on the question of parentage, wishing
seemed part of that meanness which disowns kinship: it was a disowning
by anticipation. What he had to do was simply to accept the fact; and
he had really no strong presumption to go upon, now that he was assured
of his mistake about Sir Hugo. There had been a resolved concealment
which made all inference untrustworthy, and the very name he bore might
be a false one. If Mordecai was wrong--if he, the so-called Daniel
Deronda, were held by ties entirely aloof from any such course as his
friend's pathetic hope had marked out?--he would not say "I wish"; but
he could not help feeling on which side the sacrifice lay.

Across these two importunate thoughts, which he resisted as much as one
can resist anything in that unstrung condition which belongs to
suspense, there came continually an anxiety which he made no effort to
banish--dwelling on it rather with a mournfulness, which often seems to
us the best atonement we can make to one whose need we have been unable
to meet. The anxiety was for Gwendolen. In the wonderful mixtures of
our nature there is a feeling distinct from that exclusive passionate
love of which some men and women (by no means all) are capable, which
yet is not the same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent
regard, whether admiring or compassionate: a man, say--for it is a man
who is here concerned--hardly represents to himself this shade of
feeling toward a woman more nearly than in words, "I should have loved
her, if----": the "if" covering some prior growth in the inclinations,
or else some circumstances which have made an inward prohibitory law as
a stay against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance. The "if" in
Deronda's case carried reasons of both kinds; yet he had never
throughout his relations with Gwendolen been free from the nervous
consciousness that there was something to guard against not only on her
account but on his own--some precipitancy in the manifestations of
impulsive feeling--some ruinous inroad of what