ll come back?" she said,
tasting her own tears as they fell, before she thought of drying them.

Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and went to prop himself against
the corner of the mantel-piece, at a different angle from her face. But
when she had pressed her handkerchief against her cheeks, she turned
and looked up at him, awaiting an answer.

"If I live," said Deronda--"_some time_."

They were both silent. He could not persuade himself to say more unless
she led up to it by a question; and she was apparently meditating
something that she had to say.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, at last, very mildly. "Can I
understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?"

"I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition
of my race in various countries there," said Deronda, gently--anxious
to be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of
their separateness from each other. "The idea that I am possessed with
is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a
nation again, giving them a national center, such as the English have,
though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a
task which presents itself to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it,
however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I
may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my
own."

There was a long silence between them. The world seemed getting larger
round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst.
The thought that he might come back after going to the East, sank
before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes in
which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible
moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger
destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other
neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--where
the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an
invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know
nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls
forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the
shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the
Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and
lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew
poet, making the flames his chariot, and