Page:Eliot - Daniel Deronda, vol. I, 1876.djvu/307



circumstances, indeed, had been exceptional. One moment had been burnt into his life as its chief epoch—a moment full of July sunshine and large pink roses shedding their last petals on a grassy court enclosed on three sides by a Gothic cloister. Imagine him in such a scene: a boy of thirteen, stretched prone on the grass where it was in shadow, his curly head propped on his arms over a book, while his tutor, also reading, sat on a camp–stool under shelter. Deronda's book was Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics:—the lad had a passion for history, eager to know how time had been filled up since the Flood, and how things were carried