Page:Eliot - Daniel Deronda, vol. II, 1876.djvu/325

 violent. Holding her little hands tightly clasped and looking at Mrs Meyrick with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a personification of that spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance of professed Catholicism to leave wealth and high place, and risk their lives in flight, that they might join their own people and say, "I am a Jew."

"Mirah, Mirah, my dear child, you mistake me!" said Mrs Meyrick, alarmed. "God forbid I should want you to do anything against your conscience. I was only saying what might be if the world went on. But I had better have left the world alone, and not wanted to be over-wise. Forgive me, come! we will not try to take you from anybody you feel has more right to you."

"I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life," said Mirah, not yet quite calm.

"Hush, hush, now," said Mrs Meyrick. "I have been punished enough for wagging my tongue foolishly—making an almanac for the Millennium, as my husband used to say."

"But everything in the world must come to an end some time. We must bear to think of that," said Mab, unable to hold her peace on this point. She had already suffered from a bondage of tongue which threatened to become severe if Mirah were