I tremulously

all my thoughts again, for I was locked away | else that she cared to know. She spoke rather outside them all. And I am outside now. feel nothing but a wall and darkness." Baldassarre had become dreamy again, and sank into silence, resting his head between his hands; and again Romola's belief in him had submerged all cautioning doubts. The pity with which she dwelt on his words seemed like the revival of an old pang. Had she not daily seen how her father missed Dino and the future he had dreamed of in that son?

"Come to me, then, where you came to me to-day, in the church. I will be there at ten; and if you are not there, I will go again toward "But you will help me? He has been false | mid-day. Can you remember?" to you too. He has another wife, and she has children. He makes her believe he is her husband, and she is a foolish, helpless thing. will show you where she lives."

It seemed to Romola as if every fresh hour of her life were to become more difficult than ROMOLA had a purpose in her mind as she the last. Her judgment was too vigorous and was hastening away; a purpose which had been rapid for her to fall into the mistake of using growing through the afternoon hours like a sidefutile deprecatory words to a man in Baldas-stream, rising higher and higher along with the sarre's state of mind. She chose not to answer main current. It was less a resolve than a nehis last speech. She would win time for his cessity of her feeling. Heedless of the darkenexcitement to allay itself by asking something ing streets, and not caring to call for Maso's

slow escort, she hurried across the bridge where | and rest. These fears may be only big ugly shadthe river showed itself black before the distant ows of something very little and harmless. Even dying red, and took the most direct way to the traitors must see their interest in betraying; the Old Palace. She might encounter her husband rats will run where they smell the cheese, and there. No matter. She could not weigh prob- there is no knowing yet which way the scent abilities; she must discharge her heart. She will come." did not know what she passed in the pillared court or up the wide stairs; she only knew that she asked an usher for the Gonfaloniere, giving her name, and begging to be shown into a pri

vate room.

He paused, and turned away his eyes from her with an air of abstraction, till, with a slow shrug, he added:

"As for warnings, they are of no use to me, child. I enter into no plots, but I never forsake my colors. If I march abreast with obstinate men, who will rush on guns and pikes, I must share the consequences. Let us say no more about that. I have not many years left at the bottom of my sack for them to rob me of. Go, child; go home and rest."

He put his hand on her head again caressing

She was not left long alone with the frescoed figures and the newly-lit tapers. Soon the door opened, and Bernardo del Nero entered, still carrying his white head erect above his silk lucco. "Romola, my child, what is this ?" he said, in a tone of anxious surprise, as he closed the door. She had uncovered her head and went towardly, and she could not help clinging to his arm, him without speaking. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and held her a little away from him that he might see her better. Her face was hag. gard from fatigue and long agitation, her hair had rolled down in disorder; but there was an excitement in her eyes that seemed to have triumphed over the bodily consciousness.

"What has he done?" said Bernardo, abruptly. "Tell me every thing, child; throw away pride. I am your father."

and pressing her brow against his shoulder. Her godfather's caress seemed the last thing that was left to her out of that young filial life, which now looked so happy to her even in its troubles, for they were troubles untainted by any thing hateful.

"Is silence best, my Romola?" said the old man.

"Yes, now; but I can not tell whether it always will be," she answered, hesitatingly, rais"It is not about myself—nothing about my-ing her head with an appealing look. self," said Romola, hastily. "Dearest godfather, it is about you. I have heard things some I can not tell you. But you are in danger in the palace; you are in danger every where. There are fanatical men who would harm you, and-and there are traitors. Trust nobody. If you trust, you will be betrayed."

Bernardo smiled.

"Have you worked yourself up into this agitation, my poor child," he said, raising his hand to her head, and patting it gently, "to tell such old truths as that to an old man like me?".

"Well you have a father's ear while I am above ground"-he lifted the black drapery and folded it round her head, adding-“and a father's home; remember that." Then, opening the door, he said: "There, hasten away. You are like a black ghost; you will be safe enough." When Romola fell asleep that night she slept deep.

Agitation had reached its limits; she must gather-strength before she could suffer more; and, in spite of rigid habit, she slept on far beyond sunrise.

When she awoke, it was to the sound of guns. Piero de' Medici, with thirteen hundred men at his back, was before the gate that looks toward Rome.

"Oh no, no! they are not old truths I mean," said Romola, pressing her clasped hands painfully together, as if that action would help her to suppress what must not be told. "They So much Romola learned from Maso, with are fresh things that I know, but can not tell. many circumstantial additions of dubious qualiDearest godfather, you know I am not foolish. ty. A countryman had come in and alarmed I would not come to you without reason. Is it the Signoria before it. was light, else the city too late to warn you against any one, every one would have been taken by surprise. His master who seems to be working on your side? Is it too was not in the house, having been summoned to late to say, Go to your villa and keep away in the Palazzo long ago. She sent out the old man the country when these three more days of office again, that he might gather news, while she are over? Oh, God! perhaps it is too late! went up to the loggia from time to time to try and if any harm come to you, it will be as if I and discern any signs of the dreaded entrance had done it!" having been made, or of its having been effectThe last words had burst from Romola invol-ively repelled. Maso brought her word that the untarily; a long-stifled feeling had found spas-great Piazza was full of armed men, and that modic utterance. But she herself was startled and arrested.

"I mean," she added, hesitatingly, "I know nothing positive. I only know what fills me with fears."

many of the chief citizens suspected as friends of the Medici had been summoned to the palace and detained there. Some of the people seemed not to mind whether Piero got in or not, and some said the Signoria itself had invited him; "Poor child!" said Bernardo, looking at her but however that might be, they were giving silently, with quiet penetration for a moment or him an ugly welcome; and the soldiers from Then he said "Go, Romola, go home | Pisa were coming against him.

two.

In her memory of those morning hours there were not many things that Romola could distinguish as actual external experiences standing markedly out above the tumultuous waves of retrospect and anticipation. She knew that she had really walked to the Badia by the appointed time in spite of street alarms; she knew that she had waited there in vain. And the scene she had witnessed when she came out of the church, and stood watching on the steps while the doors were being closed behind her for the afternoon interval, always came back to her like a remembered waking.

man whose distinction from the great mass of the clergy lay, not in any heretical belief, not in his superstitions, but in the energy with which he sought to make the Christian life a reality, without feeling herself drawn strongly to his side.

It was far on in the hot days of June before the Excommunication, for some weeks arrived from Rome, was solemnly published in the Duomo. Romola went to witness the scene, that the resistance it inspired might invigorate that sympathy with Savonarola which was one source of her strength. It was in memorable contrast with the scene she had been accustomed to witness there. Instead of upturned citizen-faces filling the vast area under the morning light, the youngest rising amphitheatre-wise toward the walls, and making a garland of hope around the memories of age-instead of the mighty voice thrilling all hearts with the sense of great things, visible and invisible, to be struggled for

There was a change in the faces and tones of the people, armed and unarmed, who were pausing or hurrying along the streets. The guns were firing again, but the sound only provoked laughter. She soon knew the cause of the change. Piero de' Medici and his horsemen had turned their backs on Florence, and were galloping as fast as they could along the Siena road. She learned this from a substantial shop--there were the bare walls at evening made keeping Piagnone, who had not yet laid down his pike.

"It is true," he ended, with a certain bitterness in his emphasis, "Piero is gone; but there are those left behind who were in the secret of his coming-we all know that; and, if the new Signoria does its duty, we shall soon know who they are."

The word darted through Romola like a sharp spasm; but the evil they foreshadowed was not yet close upon her, and as she entered her home again her most pressing anxiety was the possibility that she had lost sight for a long while of Baldassarre.

CHAPTER LV.

WAITING.

THE lengthening sunny days went on without bringing either what Romola most desired or what she most dreaded. They brought no sign from Baldassarre, and, in spite of special watch on the part of the Government, no revelation of the suspected conspiracy. But they brought other things which touched her closely, and bridged the phantom-crowded space of anxiety with active sympathy in immediate trial. They brought the spreading Plague and the Excommunication of Savonarola.

more sombre by the glimmer of tapers; there was the black and gray flock of monks and secular clergy, with bent, unexpectant faces; there was the occasional tinkling of little bells in the pauses of a monotonous voice reading a sentence which had already been long hanging up in the churches; and at last there was the extinction of the tapers, and the slow, shuffling tread of monkish feet departing in the dim silence.

Romola's ardor on the side of the Frate was doubly strengthened by the gleeful triumph she saw in hard and coarse faces, and by the fearstricken confusion in the faces and speech of many among his strongly attached friends. The question where the duty of obedience ends, and the duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easy one; but it was made overwhelmingly difficult by the belief that the Church wasnot a compromise of parties to secure a more or less approximate justice in the appropriation of funds, but—a living organism instinct with Divine power to bless and to curse. To most of the pious Florentines, who had hitherto felt no doubt in their adherence to the Frate, that belief was not an embraced opinion; it was an inalienable impression, like the concavity of the blue firmament; and the boldness of Savonarola's written arguments that the Excommunícation was unjust, and that, being unjust, it was not valid, only made them tremble the more, as a defiance cast at a mystic image, against whose subtle, immeasurable power there was neither weapon nor defense.

Both those events tended to arrest her incipient alienation from the Frate, and to rivet again her attachment to the man who had opened But Romola, whose mind had not been alto her the new life of duty, and who seemed now lowed to draw its early nourishment from the to be worsted in the fight for principle against traditional associations of the Christian coinmuprofligacy. For Romola could not carry from nity, in which her father had lived a life apart, day to day into the abodes of pestilence and felt her relation to the Church only through misery the sublime excitement of a gladness Savonarola; his moral force had been the only that, since such anguish existed, she too existed authority to which she had bowed; and in his to make some of the anguish less bitter, without excommunication she only saw the menace of remembering that she owed this transcendent hostile vice: on one side she saw a man whose moral life to Fra Girolamo. She could not wit-life was devoted to the ends of public virtue and ness the silencing and excommunication of a spiritual purity, and on the other the assault of

alarmed selfishness, headed by a lustful, greedy, | leviation of those public troubles which had ablying, and murderous old man, once called Rod-sorbed her activity and much of her thought, rigo Borgia, and now lifted to the pinnacle of left Romola to a less counteracted sense of her infamy as Pope Alexander the Sixth. The personal lot. The Plague had almost disapfiner shades of fact which soften the edge of such peared, and the position of Savonarola was made antitheses are not apt to be seen except by neu- more hopeful by a favorable magistracy, who trals, who are not distressed to discern some were writing urgent vindicatory letters to Rome folly in martyrs and some judiciousness in the on his behalf, entreating the withdrawal of the men who burn them. But Romola required a Excommunication. strength that neutrality could not give; and this Excommunication, which simplified and ennobled the resistant position of Savonarola by bringing into prominence its wider relations, seemed to come to her like a rescue from the threatening isolation of criticism and doubt. The Frate was now withdrawn from that smaller antagonism against Florentine enemies into which he continually fell in the unchecked excitement of the pulpit, and presented himself simply as appealing to the Christian world against a vicious exercise of ecclesiastical pow

er.

He was a standard-bearer leaping into the breach. Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating faster at the sight of some generous self-risking deed. We feel no doubt then what is the highest prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our own power to attain it. And by a new current of such enthusiasm Romola was helped through these difficult summer days.

She had ventured on no words to Tito that would apprise him of her late interview with Baldassarre, and the revelation he had made to her. What would such agitating, difficult words win from him? No admission of the truth; nothing, probably, but a cool sarcasm about her sympathy with his assassin. Baldassarre was evidently helpless: the thing to be feared was, not that he should injure Tito, but that Tito, coming upon his traces, should carry out some new scheme for ridding himself of the injured man who was a haunting dread to him. Romola felt that she could do nothing decisive until she had seen Baldassarre again, and learned the full truth about that "other wife"-learned whether she were the wife to whom Tito was first bound.

Romola's healthy and vigorous frame was undergoing the reaction of languor inevitable after continuous excitement and overexertion; but her mental restlessness would not allow her to remain at home without peremptory occupation, except during the sultry hours. In the cool of the morning and evening she walked out constantly, varying her direction as much as possible, with the vague hope that if Baldassarre were still alive she might encounter him. Perhaps some illness had brought a new paralysis of memory, and he had forgotten where she lived-forgotten even her existence. That was her most sanguine explanation of his non-appearance. The explanation she felt to be most probable was, that he had died of the Plague.

THE morning warmth was already beginning to be rather oppressive to Romola, when, after a walk along by the walls on her way from San Marco, she turned toward the intersecting streets again at the gate of Santa Croce.

The Borgo La Croce was so still that she listened to her own footsteps on the pavement in the sunny silence, until, on approaching a bend in the street, she saw, a few yards before her, a little child not more than three years old, with no other clothing than his white shirt, pause from a waddling run and look around him. In the first moment of coming nearer she could only see his back-a boy's back, square and sturdy, with a cloud of reddish-brown curls above it; but in the next he turned toward her, and she could see his dark eyes wide with tears, and his lower lip pushed up and trembling, while his fat brown fists clutched his shirt helplessly. The glimpse of a tall black figure sending a shadow over him brought his bewildered fear to a climax, and a loud crying sob sent the big tears rolling.

The possibilities about that other wife, which involved the worst wound to her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly embittering suspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating away the lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of her husband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre's revelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which would perhaps have urged some passionate speech in spite of herself if he had not been more than usually absent from home. Like many of the wealthier citi-round him, and her cheek against his, while she zens in that time of pestilence, he spent the intervals of business chiefly in the country: the agreeable Melema was welcome at many villas; and since Romola had refused to leave the city, he had no need to provide a country residence of his own.

Romola, with the ready maternal instinct which was one hidden source of her passionate tenderness, instantly uncovered her head, and, stooping down on the pavement, put her arms

spoke to him in caressing tones. At first his sobs were only the louder, but he made no effort to get away, and presently the outburst ceased with that 'strange abruptness which belongs to childish joys and griefs: his face lost its distortion, and was fixed in an open-mouthed gaze at

But at last, in the later days of July, the al- Romola.

"You have lost yourself, little one," she said, kissing him. "Never mind! we will find the house again. Perhaps mamma will meet us." She divined that he had made his escape at a moment when the mother's eyes were turned away from him, and thought it likely that he would soon be followed.

"Oh, what a heavy, heavy boy!" she said, trying to lift him. "I can not carry you. Come, then, you must toddle back by my side." The parted lips remained motionless in awed silence, and one brown fist still clutched the shirt with as much tenacity as ever; but the other yielded itself quite willingly to the wonderful white hand, strong but soft.

"You have a mamma?" said Romola, as they set out, looking down at the boy with a certain yearning. But he was mute. A girl under those circumstances might perhaps have chirped abundantly; not so this square-shouldered little man with the big cloud of curls.

He was awake to the first sign of his whereabout, however. At the turning by the front of San Ambrogio he dragged Romola toward it, looking up at her.

66

Ah, that is the way home, is it?" she said, smiling at him. He only thrust his head forward and pulled, as an admonition that they should go faster.

There was still another turning that he had a decided opinion about, and then Romola found herself in a short street leading to open garden ground. It was in front of a house at the end of this street that the little fellow paused, pulling her toward some stone stairs. He had evidently no wish for her to loose his hand, and she would not have been willing to leave him without being sure that she was delivering him to his friends. They mounted the stairs, seeing but dimly in that sudden withdrawal from the sunlight, till, at the final landing-place, an extra stream of light came from an open doorway. Passing through a small lobby they came to another open door, and there Romola paused. Her approach had not been heard.

"I am

Romola, smiling, and coming forward.
glad it was your little boy. He was crying in
the street; I suppose he had run away. So we
walked together a little way, and then he knew
where he was, and brought me here. But you
had not missed him? That is well, else you
would have been frightened."

The shock of finding that Lillo had run away overcame every other feeling in Tessa for the moment. Her color went again, and, seizing Lillo's arm, she ran with him to Monna Lisa, saying, with a half-sob, loud in the old woman's ear

"Oh, Lisa, you are wicked! Why will you stand with your back to the door? Lillo ran away ever so far into the street."

Holy Mother!" said Monna Lisa, in her meek, thick tone, letting the spoon fall from her hands. "Where were you, then? I thought

you were there, and had your eye on him."
"But you know I go to sleep when I am
rocking," said Tessa, in pettish remonstrance.
"Well, well, we must keep the outer door
shut, or else tie him up," said Monna Lisa,
"for he'll be as cunning as Satan before long,
and that's the holy truth. But how came he
back, then?"

This question recalled Tessa to the consciousness of Romola's presence. Without answering, she turned toward her, blushing and timid again, and Monna Lisa's eyes followed her movement. The old woman made a low reverence, and said,

"Doubtless the most noble lady brought him back." Then, advancing a little nearer to Romola, she added, "It's my shame for him to have been found with only his shirt on; but he kicked, and wouldn't have his other clothes on this morning, and the mother, poor thing! will never hear of his being beaten. But what's an old woman to do without a stick when the lad's legs get so strong? Let your nobleness look at his legs."

Lillo, conscious that his legs were in question, pulled his shirt up a little higher, and On a low chair at the farther end of the looked down at their olive roundness with a room, opposite the light, sat Tessa, with one dispassionate and curious air. Romola laughhand on the edge of the cradle, and her headed, and stooped to give him a caressing shake hanging a little on one side, fast asleep. Near one of the windows, with her back turned toward the door, sat Monna Lisa at her work of preparing salad, in deaf unconsciousness. There was only an instant for Romola's eyes to take in that still scene; for Lillo snatched his hand away from her and ran up to his mother's side, not making any direct effort to wake her, but only leaning his head back against her arm, and surveying Romola seriously from that dis

tance.

As Lillo pushed against her Tessa opened her eyes, and looked up in bewilderment; but her glance had no sooner rested on the figure at the opposite doorway than she started up, blushed deeply, and began to tremble a little, neither speaking nor moving forward.

"Ah! we have seen each other before," said

N

and a kiss, and this action helped the reassurance that Tessa had already gathered from Monna Lisa's address to Romola. For when Naldo had been told about the adventure at the Carnival, and Tessa had asked him who the heavenly lady that had come just when she was wanted, and had vanished so soon, was likely to be-whether she could be the Holy Madonna herself? -he had answered, "Not exactly, my Tessa; only one of the saints," and had not chosen to say more. So that in the dream-like combination of small experience which made up Tessa's thought, Romola had remained confusedly associated with the pictures in the churches, and when she reappeared the grateful remembrance of her protection was slightly tinctured with religious awe-not deeply, for Tessa's dread was chiefly of ugly and