obably been, and urged by
compassion let his eyes and voice express as much interest as they
would.

Gwendolen had slipped on to the music-stool, and looked up at him with
pain in her long eyes, like a wounded animal asking for help.

"Are you persuading Mrs. Grandcourt to play to us, Dan?" said Sir Hugo,
coming up and putting his hand on Deronda's shoulder with a gentle,
admonitory pinch.

"I cannot persuade myself," said Gwendolen, rising.

Others had followed Sir Hugo's lead, and there was an end of any
liability to confidences for that day. But the next was New Year's Eve;
and a grand dance, to which the chief tenants were invited, was to be
held in the picture-gallery above the cloister--the sort of
entertainment in which numbers and general movement may create privacy.
When Gwendolen was dressing, she longed, in remembrance of Leubronn, to
put on the old turquoise necklace for her sole ornament; but she dared
not offend her husband by appearing in that shabby way on an occasion
when he would demand her utmost splendor. Determined to wear the
memorial necklace somehow, she wound it thrice round her wrist and made
a bracelet of it--having gone to her room to put it on just before the
time of entering the ball-room.

It was always a beautiful scene, this dance on New Year's Eve, which
had been kept up by the family tradition as nearly in the old fashion
as inexorable change would allow. Red carpet was laid down for the
occasion: hot-house plants and evergreens were arranged in bowers at
the extremities and in every recess of the gallery; and the old
portraits stretching back through generations, even to the
pre-portraying period, made a piquant line of spectators. Some
neighboring gentry, major and minor, were invited; and it was certainly
an occasion when a prospective master and mistress of Abbott's and
King's Topping might see their future glory in an agreeable light, as a
picturesque provincial supremacy with a rent-roll personified by the
most prosperous-looking tenants. Sir Hugo expected Grandcourt to feel
flattered by being asked to the Abbey at a time which included this
festival in honor of the family estate; but he also hoped that his own
hale appearance might impress his successor with the probable length of
time that would elapse before the succession came, and with the wisdom
of preferring a good actual sum to a minor property that must be waited
for. All present, down to the least important farmer