She was quivering with indignant resolution: | thwarting him in spite of the husband's preit was of no use for Tito to speak in that uncon- dominance. cerned way. She distrusted every word he could

ment the self-quelling discipline of two years | per. Romola was too conscious of being masseemed to be nullified: she felt nothing but that tered to have struggled, even if she had remained they were divided. unconscious that witnesses were at hand. But They were nearly in darkness again, and could she was aware now of footsteps and voices, and only see each other's faces dimly. her habitual sense of personal dignity made her at once yield to Tito's movement toward leading her from the loggia.

"Tell me the truth, Tito-this time tell me the truth," said Romola, in a low, quivering voice. "It will be safer for you."

They walked on in silence for some time under the small drizzling rain. The first rush of indignation and alarm in Romola had begun to give way to more complicated feelings, which rendered speech and action difficult. In that simpler state of vehemence, open opposition to the husband from whom she felt her soul revolt

"Why should I desire to tell you any thing else, my angry saint ?" said Tito, with a slight touch of contempt, which was the vent of his annoyance, "since the truth is precisely that over which you have most reason to rejoicenamely, that my knowing a plot of Spini's enables me to secure the Frate from falling a vic-ing, had had the aspect of a temptation for her; tim to it."

"What is the plot ?"

"That I decline to tell," said Tito. "It is enough that the Frate's safety will be secured." "It is a plot for drawing him outside the gates that Spini may murder him."

"There has been no intention of murder. It is simply a plot for compelling him to obey the Pope's summons to Rome. But as I serve the popular government, and think the Frate's presence here is a necessary means of maintaining it at present, I choose to prevent his departure. You may go to sleep with entire ease of mind to-night."

For a moment Romola was silent. Then she said, in a voice of anguish, "Tito, it is of no use: I have no belief in you."

She could just discern his action, as he shrugged his shoulders and spread out his palms in silence. That cold dislike which is the anger of unimpassioned beings was hardening within him.

"If the Frate leaves the city-if any harm happens to him," said Romola, after a slight pause, in a new tone of indignant resolution, "I will declare what I have heard to the Signoria, | and you will be disgraced. What if I am your wife ?" she went on, impetuously; "I will be disgraced with you. If we are united, I am that part of you that will save you from crime. Others shall not be betrayed."

"I am quite aware of what you would be likely to do, anima mia," said Tito, in the coolest of his liquid tones; 66 'therefore, if you have a small amount of reasoning at your disposal just now, consider that if you believe me in nothing else, you may believe me when I say I will take care of myself, and not put it in your power to ruin me. 19

"Then you assure me that the Frate is warned-he will not go beyond the gates ?"

it seemed the easiest of all courses. But now habits of self-questioning, memories of impulse subdued, and that proud reserve which all dis[cipline had left unmodified, began to emerge from the flood of passion. The grasp of her wrists, which asserted her husband's physical predominance, instead of arousing a new fierceness in her, as it might have done if her impetuosity had been of a more vulgar kind, had given her a momentary shuddering horror at this form of contest with him. It was the first time they had been in declared hostility to each other since her flight and return, and the check given to her ardent resolution then retained the power to arrest her now. In this altered condition her mind began to dwell on the probabilities that would save her from any desperate course: Tito would not risk betrayal by her; whatever had been his original intention, he must be determined now by the fact that she knew of the plot. She was not bound now to do any thing else than to hang over him that certainty that if he deceived her, her lips would not be closed. And then, it was possible-yes, she must cling to that possibility till it was disproved—that Tito had never meant to aid in the betrayal of the Frate.

Tito, on his side, was busy with thoughts, and did not speak again till they were near home. Then he said

"Well, Romola, have you now had time to recover calmness? If so, you can supply your want of belief in me by a little rational inference: you can see, I presume, that if I had had any intention of furthering Spini's plot I should now be aware that the possession of a fair Piagnone for my wife, who knows the secret of the plot, would be a serious obstacle in my way."

Tito assumed the tone which was just then the easiest to him, conjecturing that in Romola's present mood persuasive deprecation would be

"He shall not go beyond the gates." There was a moment's pause; but distrust was lost upon her. not to be expelled.

"I will go back to San Marco now and find out,” Romola said, making a movement forward. "You shall not!" said Tito, in a bitter whisper, seizing her wrists with all his masculine force. "I am master of you. You shall not set yourself in opposition to me.

There were passers-by approaching. Tito had heard them, and that was why he spoke in a whis

Yes, Tito," she said, in a low voice, "I think you believe that I would guard the Republic from further treachery. You are right to believe it; if the Frate is betrayed, I will denounce you." She paused a moment, and then said with an effort, "But it was not so. I have perhaps spoken too hastily-you never meant it. Only, why will you seem to be that man's com rade?"

"Such relations are inevitable to practical that his understanding would discern nothing men, my Romola," said Tito, gratified by dis- but that Tito had "turned round" and fruscerning the struggle within her. "You fair trated the plot. On the other hand, by defercreatures live in the clouds. Pray go to rest ring his warning to Savonarola until the early with an easy heart," he added, opening the door morning, he would be almost sure to lose the opfor her. portunity of warning Spini that the Frate had changed his mind; and the band of Compagnacci would come back in all the rage of disappointment. This last, however, was the risk he chose, trusting to his power of soothing Spini by assuring him that the failure was due only to the Frate's caution.

CHAPTER XLVII.

CHECK.

Tito was annoyed. If he had had to smile it I would have been an unusual effort to him. He was determined not to encounter Romola again, and he did not go home that night.

She watched through the night, and never took off her clothes. She heard the rain become heavier and heavier. She liked to hear the rain the stormy heavens seemed a safeguard against men's devices, compelling them to inaction. And Romola's mind was again assailed, not only by the utmost doubt of her husband, but by doubt as to her own conduct. What lie might he not have told her? What project might he not have, of which she was still ignorant? Every one who trusted Tito was in danger; it was useless to try and persuade herself of the contrary. And was not she selfishly listening to the promptings of her own pride when she shrank from warning men against him? "If her husband was a malefactor, her place was in the prison by his side"-that might be; she was contented to fulfill that claim. was she, a wife, to allow a husband to inflict the injuries that would make him a malefactor when it might be in her power to prevent them? Prayer seemed impossible to her. The activity of her thought excluded a mental state of which the essence is expectant passivity.

But

TITO's clever arrangements had been unpleasantly frustrated by trivial incidents which could not enter into a clever man's calculations. It was very seldom that he walked with Romola in the evening, yet he had happened to be walking with her precisely on this evening when her presence was supremely inconvenient. Life was so complicated a game that the devices of skill were liable to be defeated at every turn by air-daybreak the rain became less violent, till at last blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.

It was not that he minded about the failure of Spini's plot, but he felt an awkward difficulty in so adjusting his warning to Savonarola on the one hand, and to Spini on the other, as not to incur suspicion. Suspicion roused in the popular party might be fatal to his reputation and ostensible position in Florence: suspicion roused in Dolfo Spini might be as disagreeable in its effects as the hatred of a fierce dog not to be chained.

The excitement became stronger and stronger. Her imagination, in a state of morbid activity, conjured up possible schemes by which, after all, Tito would have eluded her threat; and toward

it ceased, the breeze rose again and dispersed the clouds, and the morning fell clear on all the objects around her. It made her uneasiness all the less endurable. She wrapped her mantle round her, and ran up to the loggia, as if there could be any thing in the wide landscape that might determine her action; as if there could be any thing but roofs hiding the line of street along which Savonarola might be walking toward betrayal.

If she went to her godfather, might she not induce him, without any specific revelation, to take measures for preventing Fra Girolamo from passing the gates? But that might be too late : Romola thought, with new distress, that she had failed to learn any guiding details from Tito, and it was already long past seven. She must go to San Marco: there was nothing else to be done.

If Tito went forthwith to the monastery to warn Savonarola before the monks went to rest, his warning would follow so closely on his delivery of the forged letters that he could not escape unfavorable surmises. He could not warn Spini at once without telling him the true reason, since he could not immediately allege the discovery that Savonarola had changed his pur-! She hurried down the stairs, she went out into pose; and he knew Spini well enough to know the street without looking at her sick people,

CHAPTER XLVIII.

COUNTER-CHECK.

It was late in the afternoon when Tito returned home. Romola, seated opposite the cabinet in her narrow room, copying documents, was about to desist from her work because the light was getting dim, when her husband enterHe had come straight to this room to seek her, with a thoroughly-defined intention, and there was something new to Romola in his manner and expression as he looked at her silently on entering, and, without taking off his cap and mantle, leaned one elbow on the cabinet, and stood directly in front of her..

and walked at a swift pace along the Via de' Bardi toward the Ponte Vecchio. She would go through the heart of the city; it was the most direct road, and, besides, in the great Piazza there was a chance of encountering her husband, who, by some possibility to which she still clung, might satisfy her of the Frate's safety, and leave no need for her to go to San Marco. When she arrived in front of the Palazzo Vecchio she looked. ed eagerly into the pillared court; then her eyes swept the Piazza; but the well-known figure, once painted in her heart by young love, and now branded there by eating pain, was nowhere to be seen. She hurried straight on to the Piazza del Duomo. It was already full of movement: there were worshipers passing up and down the marble steps, there were men pausing for chat, and there were market-people carrying their burdens. Between these moving figures Romola caught a glimpse of her husband. On his way from San Marco he had turned into Nello's shop, and was now leaning against the door-post. As Romola approached she could see that he was standing and talking, with the easiest air in the world, holding his cap in his hand, and shaking back his freshly-combed hair. The contrast of this ease with the bitter anxieties he had created convulsed her with indignation: the new vision of his hardness heightened her dread. She recognized Cronaca and two other frequenters of San Marco standing near her husband. It flashed through her mind—words breaking the two years' silence of their "I will compel him to speak before those men." And her light step brought her close upon him before he had time to move, while Cronaca was saying, "Here comes Madonna Romola."

A slight shock passed through Tito's frame as he felt himself face to face with his wife. She was haggard with her anxious watching, but there was a flash of something else than anxiety in her eyes as she said,

Romola, fully assured during the day of the Frate's safety, was feeling the reaction of some penitence for the access of distrust and indignation which had impelled her to address her husband publicly on a matter that she knew he wished to be private. She told herself that she had probably been wrong. The scheming duplicity which she had heard even her godfather allude to as inseparable from party tactics might be sufficient to account for the connection with Spini, without the supposition that Tito had ever meant to further the plot. She wanted to atone for her impetuosity by confessing that she had been too hasty, and for some hours her mind had been dwelling on the possibility that this confession of hers might lead to other frank

hearts. The silence had been so complete that Tito was ignorant of her having fled from him and come back again; they had never approached an avowal of that past which, both in its young love and in the shock that shattered the love, lay locked away from them like a banquet-room where death had once broken the feast.

She looked up at him with that submission in her glance which belonged to her state of "Is the Frate gone beyond the gates ?" self-reproof; but the subtle change in his face "No," said Tito, feeling completely helpless and manner arrested her speech. For a few mobefore this woman, and needing all the self-ments they remained silent, looking at each other. command he possessed to preserve a countenance in which there should seem to be nothing stronger than surprise.

66

Tito himself felt that a crisis was come in his married life. The husband's determination to mastery, which lay deep below all blandness

And you are certain that he is not going?" and beseechingness, had risen permanently to she insisted.

"I am certain that he is not going." "That is enough," said Romola; and she turned up the steps, to take refuge in the Duomo till she could recover from her agitation.

Tito never had a feeling so near hatred as that with which his eyes followed Romola retreating up the steps.

the surface now, and seemed to alter his face, as a face is altered by a hidden muscular tension with which a man is secretly throttling or stamping out the life from something feeble, yet dangerous.

"Romola," he began, in the cool, liquid tone that made her shiver, "it is time that we should understand each other." He paused.

"That is what I most desire, Tito," she said, faintly. Her sweet pale face, with all its anger gone, and nothing but the timidity of self-doubt in it, seemed to give a marked predominance to her husband's dark strength.

There were present not only genuine followers of the Frate, but Ser Ceccone, the notary, who at that time, like Tito himself, was secretly an agent of the Mediceans. Ser Francesco di Ser Barone, more briefly known to infamy as Ser "You took a step this morning," Tito went Ceccone, was not learned, not handsome, not suc-on, "which you must now yourself perceive to cessful, and the reverse of generous. He was a have been useless-which exposed you to remark, traitor without charm. It followed that he was and may involve me in serious practical difficulnot fond of Tito Melema. ties."

"I acknowledge that I was too hasty; I am | husband which you have learned to contemplate sorry for any injustice I may have done you.' without flinching.' Romola spoke these words in a fuller and firmer tone; Tito, she hoped, would look less hard when she had expressed her regret, and then she could say other things.