"I should like to have this place to come and rest in, that's all," said Baldassarre. "I would pay for it, and harm nobody."

is deaf, and I live with her. She's a kind old | glad of that, for I'm fond of her. You would woman, and I'm not frightened at her. And like to stay here to-morrow, shouldn't you?" we live very well: we have plenty of nice things. I can have nuts if I like. And I'm not obliged to work now. I used to have to work, and I didn't like it; but I liked feeding the mules, and I should like to see poor Giannetta, the lit-man. tle mule, again. We've only got a goat and two kids, and I used to talk to the goat a good deal, because there was nobody else but Monna Lisa. But now I've got something else-can you guess what it is ?"

She drew her head back, and looked with a challenging smile at Baldassarre, as if she had proposed a difficult riddle to him.

"No," said he, putting aside his bowl, and looking at her dreamily. It seemed as if this young prattling thing were some memory come back out of his own youth.

"You like me to talk to you, don't you?" said Tessa, "but you must not tell any body. Shall I fetch you a bit of cold sausage?"

'No, indeed; I think you are not a bad old But you look sorry about something. Tell me, is there any thing you shall cry about when I leave you by yourself? I used to cry once."

"No, child; I think I shall cry no more."

"That's right; and I'll bring you some breakfast, and show you the bambino. Good-night!"

Tessa took up her bowl and lantern, and closed the door behind her. The pretty loving apparition had been no more to Baldassarre than a faint rainbow on the blackness to the man who is wrestling in deep waters. He hardly thought of her again till his dreamy waking passed into the more vivid images of disturbed sleep.

But Tessa thought much of him. She had no sooner entered the house than she told Monna

He shook his head, but he looked so mild Lisa what she had done, and insisted that the now that Tessa felt quite at her ease.

"Well, then, I've got a little baby. Such a pretty bambinetto, with little fingers and nails! Not old yet; it was born at the Natività, Monna Lisa says. I was married one Natività, a long, long while ago, and nobody knew. O Santa Madonna! I didn't mean to tell you that!" Tessa set up her shoulders and bit her lip, looking at Baldassarre as if this betrayal of secrets must have an exciting effect on him too. But he seemed not to care much; and perhaps that was in the nature of strangers.

"Yes," she said, carrying on her thought aloud, "you are a stranger; you don't live any where or know any body, do you?"

"No," said Baldassarre, also thinking aloud, rather than consciously answering, "I only know

one man."

stranger should be allowed to come and rest in the outhouse when he liked. The old woman, who had had her notions of making him a useful tenant, made a great show of reluctance, shook her head, and urged that Messer Naldo would be angry if she let any one come about the house. Tessa did not believe that. Messer Naldo had said nothing against strangers who lived nowhere; and this old man knew nobody except one person, who was not Nofri.

"Well," conceded Monna Lisa, at last, “if I let him stay for a while and carry things up the hill for me, thou must keep thy counsel and tell nobody."

"No," said Tessa, "I'll only tell the bambino."

"And then," Monna Lisa went on, in her thick under-tone, "God may love us well enough "His name is not Nofri, is it ?" said Tessa, not to let Messer Naldo find out any thing about anxiously. For he never comes here but at dark; and "No," said Baldassarre, noticing her look of as he was here two days ago, it's likely he'll nevfear. "Is that your husband's name?" er come at all till the old man's gone away again."

That mistaken supposition was very amusing to Tessa. She laughed and clapped her hands as she said,

"No, indeed! But I must not tell you any thing about my husband. You would never

think what he is-not at all like Nofri!"

She laughed again at the delightful incongruity between the name of Nofri-which was not separable from the idea of the cross-grained stepfather-and the idea of her husband.

it.

"Oh me! Monna," said Tessa, clasping her hands, "I wish Naldo had not to go such a long, long way sometimes before he comes back again."

"Ah, child, the world's big, they say. There are places behind the mountains, and if people go night and day, night and day, they get to Rome, and see the Holy Father."

Tessa looked submissive in the presence of this mystery, and began to rock her baby and sing syllables of vague loving meaning, in tones that imitated a triple chime.

"But I don't see him very often," she went on, more gravely. "And sometimes I pray to the Holy Madonna to send him oftener; and The next morning she was unusually indusonce she did. But I must go back to my bam-trious in the prospect of more dialogue and of binetto now. I'll bring it to show you to-mor- the pleasure she should give the poor old stranrow. You would like to see it. Sometimes it ger by showing him her baby. But before she cries and makes a face, but only when it's hun- could get ready to take Baldassarre his breakgry, Monna Lisa says. You wouldn't think it, fast she found that Monna Lisa had been embut Monna Lisa had babies once, and they are ploying him as a drawer of water. She deferred all dead old men. My husband says she will her paternosters, and hurried down to insist that never die now, because she's so well dried. I'm Baldassarre should sit on his straw, so that she

When Tito had first found this home for Tessa, on his return from Rome, more than a year and a half ago, he had acted, he persuaded himself, simply under the constraint imposed on him by his own kindliness after the unlucky incident which had made foolish little Tessa im

would be kinder to me now, is it not true? But I have not much to ask for, because I have every thing now-only that I should see my husband oftener. You may hold the bambino a little if you like, but I think you must not kiss him, because you might hurt him." She spoke this prohibition in a tone of sooth-agine him to be her husband. It was true that ing excuse, and Baldassarre could not refuse to hold the small package. "Poor thing! poor thing!" he said, in a deep voice, which had something strangely threatening in its apparent pity. It did not seem to him as if this guileless loving little woman could reconcile him to the world at all, but rather that she was with him against the world, that she was a creature who would need to be avenged.

"Oh, don't you be sorry for me," she said; "for, though I don't see him often, he is more beautiful and good than any body else in the world. I say prayers to him when he's away. You couldn't think what he is!"

She looked at Baldassarre with a wide glance of mysterious meaning, taking the baby from him again, and almost wishing he would question | her as if he wanted very much to know more. "Yes, I could," said Baldassarre, rather bitterly.

"No, I'm sure you never could," said Tessa, earnestly. "You thought he might be Nofri," she added, with a triumphant air of conclusive"But never mind; you couldn't know. What is your name?"

ness.

He rubbed his hand over his knitted brow, then looked at her blankly, and said, "Ah, child, what is it ?"

It was not that he did not often remember his name well enough; and if he had had presence of mind now to remember it, he would have chosen not to tell it. But a sudden question appealing to his memory had a paralyzing effect, and in that moment he was conscious of nothing but helplessness.

Ignorant as Tessa was, the pity stirred in her by his blank look taught her to say, "Never mind; you are a stranger; it is no matter about your having a name. Good-by, now, because I want my breakfast. You will come here and rest when you like; Monna Lisa says you may. And don't you be unhappy, for we'll be good to you."

"Poor thing!" said Baldassarre again.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE.

MESSER NALDO came again sooner than was expected: he came on the evening of the twenty-eighth of November, only eleven days after his previous visit, proving that he had not gone far beyond the mountains; and a scene which we have witnessed as it took place that evening in the Via de' Bardi may help to explain the impulse which turned his steps toward the hill of San Giorgio.

the kindness was manifested toward a pretty,
trusting thing, whom it was impossible to be
near without feeling inclined to caress and pet
her; but it was not less true that Tito had
movements of kindness toward her apart from
any contemplated gain to himself. Otherwise,
charming as her prettiness and prattle were in a
lazy moment, he might have preferred to be free
from her; for he was not in love with Tessa-
he was in love, for the first time in his life, with
an entirely different woman, whom he was not
simply inclined to shower caresses on, but whose
presence possessed him so that the simple sweep
of her long tresses across his cheek seemed to
vibrate through the hours. All the young ideal
passion he had in him had been stirred by Ro-
mola, and his fibre was too fine, his intellect too
bright, for him to be tempted into the habits of
a gross pleasure-seeker.
But he had spun a
web about himself and Tessa, which he felt in-
capable of breaking: in the first moments after
the mimic marriage he had been prompted to
leave her under an illusion by a distinct calcula-
tion of his own possible need, but since that crit-
ical moment it seemed to him that the web had
gone on spinning in spite of him, like a growth
over which he had no power. The elements of
kindness and self-indulgence are hard to distin-
guish in a soft nature like Tito's; and the an-
noyance he had felt under Tessa's pursuit of him
on the day of his betrothal, the thorough inten-
tion of revealing the truth to her with which he
set out to fulfill his promise of seeing her again,
were a sufficiently strong argument to him that,
in ultimately leaving Tessa under her illusion,
and providing a home for her, he had been over-
come by his own kindness. And in these days
of his first devotion to Romola he needed a self-
justifying argument. He had learned to be glad
that she was deceived about some things.
every strong feeling makes to itself a conscience
of its own-has its own piety; just as much as
the feeling of the son toward the mother, which
will sometimes survive amidst the worst fumes
of depravation; and Tito could not yet be easy
in committing a secret offense against his wed-
ded love.

But

But he was all the more careful in taking precautions to preserve the secrecy of the offense. Monna Lisa, who, like many of her class, never left her habitation except to go to one or two particular shops, and to confession once a year, knew nothing of his real name and whereabout: she only knew that he paid her so as to make her very comfortable, and minded little about the rest, save that she got fond of Tessa, and liked the cares for which she was paid. There was some mystery behind, clearly, since Tessa was a contadina, and Messer Naldo was a signor;

No wonder, then, that the steps took the same course on this evening, eleven days later, when he had had to recoil under Romola's first outburst of scorn. He could not wish Tessa in his wife's place, or refrain from wishing that his wife should be thoroughly reconciled to him; for it was Romola, and not Tessa, that belonged to the world where all the larger desires of a man who had ambition and effective faculties must necessarily lie. But he wanted a refuge from a standard disagreeably rigorous, of which he could not make himself independent simply by thinking it folly; and Tessa's little soul was that inviting refuge.

but, for aught Monna Lisa knew, he might be a | where he could adjust his mind to the morrow, real husband. For Tito had thoroughly fright-without caring how he behaved at the present ened Tessa into silence about the circumstances moment. And there was a sweet adoring creatof their marriage, by telling her that if she broke ure within reach whose presence was as safe and that silence she would never see him again; and unconstraining as that of her own kids-who Monna Lisa's deafness, which made it impossi- would believe any fable, and remain quite unble to say any thing to her without some pre-impressed by public opinion. And so on that meditation, had saved Tessa from any incau- evening, when Romola was waiting and listentious revelation to her, such as had run off her ing for him, he turned his steps up the hill. tongue in talking with Baldassarre. And for a long while Tito's visits were so rare, that it seemed likely enough he took journeys between them. They were prompted chiefly by the desire to see that all things were going on well with Tessa; and though he always found his visit pleasanter than the prospect of it-always felt anew the charm of that pretty ignorant lovingness and trust he had not yet any real need of it. But he was determined, if possible, to preserve the simplicity on which the charm depended; to keep Tessa a genuine contadina, and not place the small field-flower among conditions that would rob it of its grace. He would have been shocked to see her in the dress of any other rank than her own; the piquancy of her talk would be all gone if things began to have new relations for her, if her world became wider, her pleasures less childish; and the squirrel-like enjoyment of nuts at discretion marked the stand- | ard of the luxuries he provided for her. By this means Tito saved Tessa's charm from being sullied; and he also, by a convenient coincidence, saved himself from aggravating expenses that were already rather importunate to a man whose money was all required for his avowed habits of life.

It

It was not much more than eight o'clock when he went up the stone steps to the door of Tessa's room. Usually she heard his entrance into the house, and ran to meet him, but not to-night; and when he opened the door he saw the reason. A single dim light was burning above the dying fire, and showed Tessa in a kneeling attitude by the head of the bed where the baby lay. Her head had fallen aside on the pillow, and her brown rosary, which usually hung above the pillow over the picture of the Madonna and the golden palm-branches, lay in the loose grasp of her right hand. She had gone fast asleep over her beads. Tito stepped lightly across the little room, and sat down close to her. She had probably heard the opening of the door as part of her dream, for he had not been looking at her two moments before she opened her eyes. She opened them without any start, and remained quite motionless looking at him, as if the sense that he was there smiling at her shut out any impulse which could disturb that happy passiveness. But when he put his hand under her chin, and stoopto kiss her, she said:

"I dreamed it, and then I said it was dreaming-and then I awoke, and it was true."

"Little sinner!" said Tito, pinching her chin, "you have not said half your prayers. I will punish you by not looking at your baby; it is ugly.'

This, in brief, had been the history of Tito's relation to Tessa up to a very recent day. is true that once or twice before Bardo's death the sense that there was Tessa up the hill, with whom it was possible to pass an hour agreeably, had been an inducement to him to escape from a little weariness of the old man, when, for lack of any positive engagement, he might otherwise have borne the weariness patiently and shared Romola's burden. But the moment when he had first felt a real hunger for Tessa's ignoranted lovingness and belief in him had not come till quite lately, and it was distinctly marked out by circumstances as little to be forgotten as the oncoming of a malady that has permanently vitiated the sight and hearing. It was the day when he had first seen Baldassarre, and had bought the armor. Returning across the bridge that night, with the coat of mail in his hands, he had felt an unconquerable shrinking from an immediate encounter with Romola. She, too, knew little of the actual world; she, too, trusted him; but he had an uneasy consciousness that behind her frank eyes there was a nature that could judge him, and that any ill-founded trust of hers sprang not from pretty brute-like incapacity, but from a nobleness which might prove an alarming touchstone. He wanted a little ease, a little repose from self-control, after the agitation and exertions of the day; he wanted to be

Tessa did not like those words, even though Tito was smiling. She had some pouting distress in her face as she said, bending anxiously over the baby,

"Ah, it is not true! He is prettier than any thing. You do not think he is ugly. You will look at him. He is even prettier than when you saw him before-only he's asleep, and you can't see his eyes or his tongue, and I can't show you his hair-and it grows-isn't that wonderful? Look at him! It's true his face is very much all alike when he's asleep; there is not so much to see as when he's awake. If you kiss him very

gently he won't wake: you want to kiss him, is | he cries about something when I don't see him. it not true?"

He satisfied her by giving the small mummy a butterfly-kiss, and then, putting his hand on her shoulder and turning her face toward him, said, "You like looking at the baby better than looking at your husband, you false one!"

She was still kneeling, and now rested her hands on his knee, looking up at him like one of Fra Lippo Lippi's round-cheeked adoring angels.

"No," she said, shaking her head; "I love you always best, only I want you to look at the bambino and love him; I used only to want you to love me.

"And did you expect me to come again so soon?" said Tito, inclined to make her prattle. He still felt the effects of the agitation he had undergone, still felt like a man who has been violently jarred, and this was the easiest relief from silence and solitude.

"Ah no," said Tessa, "I have counted the days-to-day I began at my right thumb again -since you put on the beautiful chain coat, that Messer Saint Michael gave you to take care of you on your journey. And you have got it on now," she said, peeping through the opening in the breast of his tunic. "Perhaps it made you come back sooner." "Perhaps it did, Tessa," he said. "But don't mind the coat now. Tell me what has happened since I was here. Did you see the tents in the Prato, and the soldiers and horsemen when they passed the bridges-did you hear the drums and trumpets?"

"Yes, and I was rather frightened, because I thought the soldiers might come up here. And Monna Lisa was a little afraid too, for she said they might carry our kids off; she said it was their business to do mischief. But the Holy Madonna took care of us, for we never saw one of them up here, But something has happened, only I hardly dare tell you, and that is what I was saying more aves for."

1

"What do you mean, Tessa?" said Tito, rather anxiously. "Make haste and tell me.' "Yes, but will you let me sit on your knee? because then I think I shall not be so frightened."

He took her on his knee, and put his arm round her, but looked grave: it seemed that something unpleasant must pursue him even here.

"At first, I didn't mean to tell you," said Tessa, speaking almost in a whisper, as if that would mitigate the offense; "because we thought the old man would be gone away before you came again, and it would be as if it had not been. But now he is there, and you are come, and I never did any thing you told me not to do before. And I want to tell you, and then you will perhaps forgive me, for it is a long while before I go to confession."

But that was not the reason I went to him first;
it was because I wanted to talk to him and show
him my baby, and he was a stranger that lived
nowhere, and I thought you wouldn't care so
much about my talking to him. And I think
he is not a bad old man, and he wanted to come
and sleep on the straw next to the goats, and I
made Monna Lisa say, 'Yes, he might,' and he's
away all the day almost, but when he comes
back, I talk to him, and take him something to
eat.
It was naughty

"Some beggar, I suppose.

of you, Tessa, and I am angry with Monna Lisa. I must have him sent away.'

"No, I think he is not a beggar, for he wanted to pay Monna Lisa, only she asked him to do work for her instead. And he gets himself shaved, and his clothes are tidy: Monna Lisa says he is a decent man. But sometimes I think he is not in his right mind. Lupo, at Peretola, was not in his right mind: and he looks a little like Lupo sometimes, as if he didn't know where he was.

"What sort of face has he?" said Tito, his heart beginning to beat strangely. He was so haunted by the thought of Baldassarre, that it was already he whom he saw in imagination sitting on the straw not many yards from him. "Fetch your stool, my Tessa, and sit on it."

"Shall you not forgive me?" she said, timidly, moving from his knee.

"Yes, I will not be angry-only sit down, and tell me what sort of old man this is."

"I can't think how to tell you: `he is not like my step-father, Nofri, or any body. His face is yellow, and he has deep marks in it; and his hair is white, but there is none on the top of his head: and his eyebrows are black, and he looks from under them at me, and says, 'Poor thing!' to me, as if he thought I was beaten as I used to be; and that seems as if he couldn't be in his right mind, doesn't it? And I asked him his name once, but he couldn't tell it me: yet every body has a name-is it not true? And he has a book now, and keeps looking at it ever so long, as if he were a padre. But I think he is not saying prayers, for his lips never move; ah, you are angry with me, or is it because you are sorry for the old man ?"

Tito's eyes were still fixed on Tessa; but he had ceased to see her, and was only seeing the objects her words suggested. It was this absent glance which frightened her, and she could not help going to kneel at his side again. But he did not heed her, and she dared not touch him, or speak to him: she knelt, trembling and wondering; and this state of mind suggesting her beads to her, she took them from the floor, and began to tell them again, her pretty lips moving silently, and her blue eyes wide with anxiety and struggling tears.

Tito was quite unconscious of her movements He-unconscious of his own attitude: he was in that rapt state in which a man will grasp painful roughness, and press, and press it closer, and

"Yes, tell me every thing, my Tessa." began to hope it was after all a trivial matter. 'Oh, you will be sorry for him: I'm afraid

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