hat they would pass into the hands of
his grandson. And now his hope is fulfilled, in spite of attempts to
thwart it by hiding my parentage from me. I possess the chest
containing them, with his own papers, and it is down below in this
house. I mean to leave it with you, Mordecai, that you may help me to
study the manuscripts. Some of them I can read easily enough--those in
Spanish and Italian. Others are in Hebrew, and, I think, Arabic; but
there seem to be Latin translations. I was only able to look at them
cursorily while I stayed at Mainz. We will study them together."

Deronda ended with that bright smile which, beaming out from the
habitual gravity of his face, seemed a revelation (the reverse of the
continual smile that discredits all expression). But when this happy
glance passed from Mordecai to rest on Mirah, it acted like a little
too much sunshine, and made her change her attitude. She had knelt
under an impulse with which any personal embarrassment was incongruous,
and especially any thoughts about how Mrs. Grandcourt might stand to
this new aspect of things--thoughts which made her color under
Deronda's glance, and rise to take her seat again in her usual posture
of crossed hands and feet, with the effort to look as quiet as
possible. Deronda, equally sensitive, imagined that the feeling of
which he was conscious, had entered too much into his eyes, and had
been repugnant to her. He was ready enough to believe that any
unexpected manifestation might spoil her feeling toward him--and then
his precious relation to brother and sister would be marred. If Mirah
could have no love for him, any advances of love on his part would make
her wretched in that continual contact with him which would remain
inevitable.

While such feelings were pulsating quickly in Deronda and Mirah,
Mordecai, seeing nothing in his friend's presence and words but a
blessed fulfillment, was already speaking with his old sense of
enlargement in utterance--

"Daniel, from the first, I have said to you, we know not all the
pathways. Has there not been a meeting among them, as of the operations
in one soul, where an idea being born and breathing draws the elements
toward it, and is fed and glows? For all things are bound together in
that Omnipresence which is the place and habitation of the world, and
events are of a glass wherethrough our eyes see some of the pathways.
And if it seems that the erring and unloving wills of men have helped