And for the moment he felt a sort
of comfort in recovering his daughter's dutiful attendance, that made a
change of habits seem possible to him. She led him down to the parlor
below, and said--

"This is my sitting-room when I am not with Ezra, and there is a
bed-room behind which shall be yours. You will stay and be good,
father. Think that you are come back to my mother, and that she has
forgiven you--she speaks to you through me." Mirah's tones were
imploring, but she could not give one of her former caresses.

Lapidoth quickly recovered his composure, began to speak to Mirah of
the improvement in her voice, and other easy subjects, and when Mrs.
Adam came to lay out his supper, entered into converse with her in
order to show her that he was not a common person, though his clothes
were just now against him.

But in his usual wakefulness at night, he fell to wondering what money
Mirah had by her, and went back over old Continental hours at
_Roulette_, reproducing the method of his play, and the chances that
had frustrated it. He had had his reasons for coming to England, but
for most things it was a cursed country.

These were the stronger visions of the night with Lapidoth, and not the
worn frame of his ireful son uttering a terrible judgment. Ezra did
pass across the gaming-table, and his words were audible; but he passed
like an insubstantial ghost, and his words had the heart eaten out of
them by numbers and movements that seemed to make the very tissue of
Lapidoth's consciousness.

CHAPTER LXVII.

The godhead in us wrings our noble deeds
From our reluctant selves.

It was an unpleasant surprise to Deronda when he returned from the
Abbey to find the undesirable father installed in the lodgings at
Brompton. Mirah had felt it necessary to speak of Deronda to her
father, and even to make him as fully aware as she could of the way in
which the friendship with Ezra had begun, and of the sympathy which had
cemented it. She passed more lightly over what Deronda had done for
her, omitting altogether the rescue from drowning, and speaking of the
shelter she had found in Mrs. Meyrick's family so as to leave her
father to suppose that it was through these friends Deronda had become
acquainted with her. She could not persuade herself to more
completeness in her narrative: she could not let the breath of her
father's soul pass over her relation to Deronda. And Lapidoth, for
reasons, was not eager in his q