what a dear gazelle I am, I am constantly wondering
to find myself alive."

"Oh me, Hans!" said Mab, impatiently, "if you must talk of yourself,
let it be behind your own back. What _is_ it that has happened?"

"Duke Alfonso is drowned, and the Duchess is alive, that's all," said
Hans, putting the paper before Mrs. Meyrick, with his finger against a
paragraph. "But more than all is--Deronda was at Genoa in the same
hotel with them, and he saw her brought in by the fishermen who had got
her out of the water time enough to save her from any harm. It seems
they saw her jump in after her husband, which was a less judicious
action than I should have expected of the Duchess. However Deronda is a
lucky fellow in being there to take care of her."

Mirah had sunk on the music stool again, with her eyelids down and her
hands tightly clasped; and Mrs. Meyrick, giving up the paper to Mab,
said--

"Poor thing! she must have been fond of her husband to jump in after
him."

"It was an inadvertence--a little absence of mind," said Hans, creasing
his face roguishly, and throwing himself into a chair not far from
Mirah. "Who can be fond of a jealous baritone, with freezing glances,
always singing asides?--that was the husband's _role_, depend upon it.
Nothing can be neater than his getting drowned. The Duchess is at
liberty now to marry a man with a fine head of hair, and glances that
will melt instead of freezing her. And I shall be invited to the
wedding."

Here Mirah started from her sitting posture, and fixing her eyes on
Hans, with an angry gleam in them, she said, in a deeply-shaken voice
of indignation--

"Mr. Hans, you ought not to speak in that way. Mr. Deronda would not
like you to speak so. Why will you say he is lucky--why will you use
words of that sort about life and death--when what is life to one is
death to another? How do you know it would be lucky if he loved Mrs.
Grandcourt? It might be a great evil to him. She would take him away
from my brother--I know she would. Mr. Deronda would not call that
lucky to pierce my brother's heart."

All three were struck with the sudden transformation. Mirah's face,
with a look of anger that might have suited Ithuriel, pale, even to the
lips that were usually so rich of tint, was not far from poor Hans, who
sat transfixed, blushing under it as if he had been a girl, while he
said, nervously--

"I am a fool and a brute, and I withdraw every word. I'll go and hang
myself l