is why I am in distress."

"Our mother will be good to you," cried Mab. "See what a nice little
mother she is!"

"Do sit down now," said Kate, moving a chair forward, while Amy ran to
get some tea.

Mirah resisted no longer, but seated herself with perfect grace,
crossing her little feet, laying her hands one over the other on her
lap, and looking at her friends with placid reverence; whereupon Hafiz,
who had been watching the scene restlessly came forward with tail erect
and rubbed himself against her ankles. Deronda felt it time to go.

"Will you allow me to come again and inquire--perhaps at five
to-morrow?" he said to Mrs. Meyrick.

"Yes, pray; we shall have had time to make acquaintance then."

"Good-bye," said Deronda, looking down at Mirah, and putting out his
hand. She rose as she took it, and the moment brought back to them both
strongly the other moment when she had first taken that outstretched
hand. She lifted her eyes to his and said with reverential fervor, "The
God of our fathers bless you and deliver you from all evil as you have
delivered me. I did not believe there was any man so good. None before
have thought me worthy of the best. You found me poor and miserable,
yet you have given me the best."

Deronda could not speak, but with silent adieux to the Meyricks,
hurried away.

BOOK III--MAIDENS CHOOSING.

CHAPTER XIX.

"I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, 'Tis
all barren': and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not
cultivate the fruits it offers."--STERNE: _Sentimental Journey_.

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but
under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor
which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of
every-day life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever
in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in
any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They
exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in
railway carriages: what banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and
lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from
the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished
us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness,
no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and
back again from the di