lence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great
Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the
blackness above. Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving of
the days as he might have watched a wonderful clock where the striking
of the hours was made solemn with antique figures advancing and
retreating in monitory procession, while he still kept his ear open for
another kind of signal which would have its solemnity too: He was
beginning to sicken of occupation, and found himself contemplating all
activity with the aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his
letters to Mordecai and Hans, he had avoided writing about himself, but
he was really getting into that state of mind to which all subjects
become personal; and the few books he had brought to make him a refuge
in study were becoming unreadable, because the point of view that life
would make for him was in that agitating moment of uncertainty which is
close upon decision.

Many nights were watched through by him in gazing from the open window
of his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the
heavens; often in struggling under the oppressive skepticism which
represented his particular lot, with all the importance he was allowing
Mordecai to give it, as of no more lasting effect than a dream--a set
of changes which made passion to him, but beyond his consciousness were
no more than an imperceptible difference of mass and shadow; sometimes
with a reaction of emotive force which gave even to sustained
disappointment, even to the fulfilled demand of sacrifice, the nature
of a satisfied energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it
might be, the attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet
irresistible hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities
might befall him--the blending of a complete personal love in one
current with a larger duty; and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion
(what human creature escapes it?) against things in general because
they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her
equivocal fate moved as busy images of what was amiss in the world
along with the concealments which he had felt as a hardship in his own
life, and which were acting in him now under the form of an afflicting
doubtfulness about the mother who had announced herself coldly and
still kept away.

But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting
there was a new kind