he year before in
the synagogue at Frankfort. He wore his hat--it seemed to be the same
old felt hat as before--and near him was a packed portmanteau with a
wrap and overcoat upon it. On seeing Deronda enter he rose, but did not
advance or put out his hand. Looking at him with small penetrating eyes
which glittered like black gems in the midst of his yellowish face and
white hair, he said in German--

"Good! It is now you who seek me, young man."

"Yes; I seek you with gratitude, as a friend of my grandfather's," said
Deronda, "and I am under an obligation to you for giving yourself much
trouble on my account." He spoke without difficulty in that liberal
German tongue which takes many strange accents to its maternal bosom.

Kalonymos now put out his hand and said cordially, "So you are no
longer angry at being something more than an Englishman?"

"On the contrary. I thank you heartily for helping to save me from
remaining in ignorance of my parentage, and for taking care of the
chest that my grandfather left in trust for me."

"Sit down, sit down," said Kalonymos, in a quick undertone, seating
himself again, and pointing to a chair near him. Then deliberately
laying aside his hat and showing a head thickly covered, with white
hair, he stroked and clutched his beard while he looked examiningly at
the young face before him. The moment wrought strongly on Deronda's
imaginative susceptibility: in the presence of one linked still in
zealous friendship with the grandfather whose hope had yearned toward
him when he was unborn, and who, though dead, was yet to speak with him
in those written memorials which, says Milton, "contain a potency of
life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are," he
seemed to himself to be touching the electric chain of his own
ancestry; and he bore the scrutinizing look of Kalonymos with a
delighted awe, something like what one feels in the solemn
commemoration of acts done long ago but still telling markedly on the
life of to-day. Impossible for men of duller, fibre--men whose
affection is not ready to diffuse itself through the wide travel of
imagination, to comprehend, perhaps even to credit this sensibility of
Deronda's; but it subsisted, like their own dullness, notwithstanding
their lack of belief in it--and it gave his face an expression which
seemed very satisfactory to the observer.

He said in Hebrew, quoting from one of the fine hymns in the Hebrew
liturgy, "As th