ts fervor from the keen comparison with what others had thought
enough to render to her. Deronda's affinity in feeling enabled him to
penetrate such secrets. But he was not near the truth in admitting the
idea that Mordecai had broken his characteristic reticence. To no soul
but Deronda himself had he yet breathed the history of their relation
to each other, or his confidence about his friend's origin: it was not
only that these subjects were for him too sacred to be spoken of
without weighty reason, but that he had discerned Deronda's shrinking
at any mention of his birth; and the severity of reserve which had
hindered Mordecai from answering a question on a private affair of the
Cohen family told yet more strongly here.

"Ezra, how is it?" Mirah one day said to him--"I am continually going
to speak to Mr. Deronda as if he were a Jew?"

He smiled at her quietly, and said, "I suppose it is because he treats
us as if he were our brother. But he loves not to have the difference
of birth dwelt upon."

"He has never lived with his parents, Mr. Hans, says," continued Mirah,
to whom this was necessarily a question of interest about every one for
whom she had a regard.

"Seek not to know such things from Mr. Hans," said Mordecai, gravely,
laying his hand on her curls, as he was wont. "What Daniel Deronda
wishes us to know about himself is for him to tell us."

And Mirah felt herself rebuked, as Deronda had done. But to be rebuked
in this way by Mordecai made her rather proud.

"I see no one so great as my brother," she said to Mrs. Meyrick one day
that she called at the Chelsea house on her way home, and, according to
her hope, found the little mother alone. "It is difficult to think that
he belongs to the same world as those people I used to live amongst. I
told you once that they made life seem like a madhouse; but when I am
with Ezra he makes me feel that his life is a great good, though he has
suffered so much; not like me, who wanted to die because I had suffered
a little, and only for a little while. His soul is so full, it is
impossible for him to wish for death as I did. I get the same sort of
feeling from him that I got yesterday, when I was tired, and came home
through the park after the sweet rain had fallen and the sunshine lay
on the grass and flowers. Everything in the sky and under the sky
looked so pure and beautiful that the weariness and trouble and folly
seemed only a small part of what is, and I becam