 trick of thinking to be either premature or
behindhand.
    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 fulfil; 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 for evermore 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 pietà 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
