hand.

However, he sent the note to Deronda's chambers, and it found him there.

CHAPTER LXV.

"O, welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!"
--MILTON.

Deronda did not obey Gwendolen's new summons without some agitation.
Not his vanity, but his keen sympathy made him susceptible to the
danger that another's heart might feel larger demands on him than he
would be able to fulfill; and it was no longer a matter of argument
with him, but of penetrating consciousness, that Gwendolen's soul clung
to his with a passionate need. We do not argue the existence of the
anger or the scorn that thrills through us in a voice; we simply feel
it, and it admits of no disproof. Deronda felt this woman's destiny
hanging on his over a precipice of despair. Any one who knows him
cannot wonder at his inward confession, that if all this had happened
little more than a year ago, he would hardly have asked himself whether
he loved her; the impetuous determining impulse which would have moved
him would have been to save her from sorrow, to shelter her life
forevermore from the dangers of loneliness, and carry out to the last
the rescue he had begun in that monitory redemption of the necklace.
But now, love and duty had thrown other bonds around him, and that
impulse could no longer determine his life; still, it was present in
him as a compassionate yearning, a painful quivering at the very
imagination of having again and again to meet the appeal of her eyes
and words. The very strength of the bond, the certainty of the resolve,
that kept him asunder from her, made him gaze at her lot apart with the
more aching pity.

He awaited her coming in the back drawing-room--part of that white and
crimson space where they had sat together at the musical party, where
Gwendolen had said for the first time that her lot depended on his not
forsaking her, and her appeal had seemed to melt into the melodic
cry--_Per pieta non dirmi addio_. But the melody had come from Mirah's
dear voice.

Deronda walked about this room, which he had for years known by heart,
with a strange sense of metamorphosis in his own life. The familiar
objects around him, from Lady Mallinger's gently smiling portrait to
the also human and urbane faces of the lions on the pilasters of the
chimney-piece, seemed almost to belong to a previous state of existence
which he was revisiting