departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.' I bowed in silence. I
meant not to marry again--no more than I meant to be the shattered
woman that I am now."

She ceased speaking, and her head sank back while she looked vaguely
before her. Her thought was traveling through the years, and when she
began to speak again her voice had lost its argumentative spirit, and
had fallen into a veiled tone of distress.

"But months ago this Kalonymos saw you in the synagogue at Frankfort.
He saw you enter the hotel, and he went to ask your name. There was
nobody else in the world to whom the name would have told anything
about me."

"Then it is not my real name?" said Deronda, with a dislike even to
this trifling part of the disguise which had been thrown round him.

"Oh, as real as another," said his mother, indifferently. "The Jews
have always been changing their names. My father's family had kept the
name of Charisi: my husband was a Charisi. When I came out as a singer,
we made it Alcharisi. But there had been a branch of the family my
father had lost sight of who called themselves Deronda, and when I
wanted a name for you, and Sir Hugo said, 'Let it be a foreign name,' I
thought of Deronda. But Joseph Kalonymos had heard my father speak of
the Deronda branch, and the name confirmed his suspicion. He began to
suspect what had been done. It was as if everything had been whispered
to him in the air. He found out where I was. He took a journey into
Russia to see me; he found me weak and shattered. He had come back
again, with his white hair, and with rage in his soul against me. He
said I was going down to the grave clad in falsehood and
robbery--falsehood to my father and robbery of my own child. He accused
me of having kept the knowledge of your birth from you, and having
brought you up as if you had been the son of an English gentleman.
Well, it was true; and twenty years before I would have maintained that
I had a right to do it. But I can maintain nothing now. No faith is
strong within me. My father may have God on his side. This man's words
were like lion's teeth upon me. My father's threats eat into me with my
pain. If I tell everything--if I deliver up everything--what else can
be demanded of me? I cannot make myself love the people I have never
loved--is it not enough that I lost the life I did love?"

She had leaned forward a little in her low-toned pleading, that seemed
like a smothered cry: her arms and hands were