ner seated--he at a little distance opposite to
her--than she said:

"You were afraid of coming to see me, because I was so full of grief
and despair the last time. But I am not so today. I have been sorry
ever since. I have been making it a reason why I should keep up my hope
and be as cheerful as I can, because I would not give you any pain
about me."

There was an unwonted sweetness in Gwendolen's tone and look as she
uttered these words that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost cruelty
into the task now laid upon him. But he felt obliged to make his answer
a beginning of the task.

"I _am_ in some trouble to-day," he said, looking at her rather
mournfully; "but it is because I have things to tell you which you will
almost think it a want of confidence on my part not to have spoken of
before. They are things affecting my own life--my own future. I shall
seem to have made an ill return to you for the trust you have placed in
me--never to have given you an idea of events that make great changes
for me. But when we have been together we have hardly had time to enter
into subjects which at the moment were really less pressing to me than
the trials you have been going through." There was a sort of timid
tenderness in Deronda's deep tones, and he paused with a pleading look,
as if it had been Gwendolen only who had conferred anything in her
scenes of beseeching and confession.

A thrill of surprise was visible in her. Such meaning as she found in
his words had shaken her, but without causing fear. Her mind had flown
at once to some change in his position with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir
Hugo's property. She said, with a sense of comfort from Deronda's way
of asking her pardon--

"You never thought of anything but what you could do to help me; and I
was so troublesome. How could you tell me things?"

"It will perhaps astonish you," said Deronda, "that I have only quite
lately known who were my parents."

Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the more assured that her
expectations of what was coming were right. Deronda went on without
check.

"The reason why you found me in Italy was that I had gone there to
learn that--in fact, to meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was
brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She parted with me after my
father's death, when I was a little creature. But she is now very ill,
and she felt that the secrecy ought not to be any longer maintained.
Her chief reason had been that