t me to the very best."

"It was my good chance to find you," said Deronda. "Any other man would
have been glad to do what I did."

"That is not the right way to be thinking about it," said Mirah,
shaking her head with decisive gravity, "I think of what really was. It
was you, and not another, who found me and were good to me."

"I agree with Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Saint Anybody is a bad saint
to pray to."

"Besides, Anybody could not have brought me to you," said Mirah,
smiling at Mrs. Meyrick. "And I would rather be with you than with any
one else in the world except my mother. I wonder if ever a poor little
bird, that was lost and could not fly, was taken and put into a warm
nest where was a mother and sisters who took to it so that everything
came naturally, as if it had been always there. I hardly thought before
that the world could ever be as happy and without fear as it is to me
now." She looked meditative a moment, and then said, "sometimes I am a
_little_ afraid."

"What is it you are afraid of?" said Deronda with anxiety.

"That when I am turning at the corner of a street I may meet my father.
It seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my
only sorrow," said Mirah, plaintively.

"It is surely not very probable," said Deronda, wishing that it were
less so; then, not to let the opportunity escape--"Would it be a great
grief to you now if you were never to meet your mother?"

She did not answer immediately, but meditated again, with her eyes
fixed on the opposite wall. Then she turned them on Deronda and said
firmly, as if she had arrived at the exact truth, "I want her to know
that I have always loved her, and if she is alive I want to comfort
her. She may be dead. If she were I should long to know where she was
buried; and to know whether my brother lives, so that we can remember
her together. But I will try not to grieve. I have thought much for so
many years of her being dead. And I shall have her with me in my mind,
as I have always had. We can never be really parted. I think I have
never sinned against her. I have always tried not to do what would hurt
her. Only, she might be sorry that I was not a good Jewess."

"In what way are you not a good Jewess?" said Deronda.

"I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among
Christians just as they did. But I have heard my father laugh at the
strictness of the Jews about their food and all customs, and their not