him, their faces being shone upon by the light of his tapers while his own was in shadow.

"Ha! my children!" he said, instantly, stretching out his hands in a benedictory attitude, "you are come to be married. I commend your penitence-the blessing of Holy Church can never come too late."

But while he was speaking he had taken in the whole meaning of Tessa's attitude and expression, and he discerned an opportunity for a new kind of joke which required him to be cautious and solemn.

"Should you like to be married to me, Tessa?" said Tito, softly, half enjoying the comedy, as he saw the pretty childish seriousness on her face, half prompted by hazy previsions which belonged to the intoxication of despair.

He felt her vibrating before she looked up at him and said, timidly, "Will you let me ?"

He answered only by a smile, and by leading her forward in front of the cerretano, who seeing an excellent jest in Tessa's evident delusion, assumed a surpassing sacerdotal solemnity, and went through the mimic ceremony with a liberal expenditure of lingua furbesca or thieves' Latin. But some symptoms of a new movement in the crowd urged him to bring it to a speedy conclusion and dismiss them with hands outstretched in a benedictory attitude over their kneeling figures. Tito, disposed always to cultivate goodwill, though it might be the least select, put a piece of four grossi into his hand as he moved away, and was thanked by a look which, the conjuror felt sure, conveyed a perfect understanding of the whole affair.

"Yes, I will, I will," she said, in a loud whisper, frightened at that blank prospect.

They were silent a little while, and then Tessa, looking at her hand, said,

"The madre wears a betrothal ring. She went to church and had it put on, and then after that, another day, she was married. And so did the cousin Nannina. But then she married Gollo," added the poor little thing, entangled in the difficult comparison between her own case and others within her experience.

"But you must not wear a betrothal ring, my Tessa, because no one must know you are married," said Tito, feeling some insistance necessary. "And the buona fortuna I gave you did just as well for betrothal. Some people are betrothed with rings and some are not."

"Yes, it is true, they would see the ring," said Tessa, trying to convince herself that a thing she would like very much was really not good for her.

They were now near the entrance of the church again, and she remembered her cocoons which were still in Tito's hand.

"Ah, you must give me the boto," she said; "and we must go in, and I must take it to the padre, and I must tell the rest of my beads, because I was too tired before."

But Tito himself was very far from that understanding, and did not, in fact, know whether, "Yes, you must go in, Tessa; but I will not the next moment, he should tell Tessa of the go in. I must leave you now," said Tito, too joke and laugh at her for a little goose, or wheth-fevered and weary to re-enter that stifling heat, er he should let her delusion last, and see what and feeling that this was the least difficult way would come of it-see what she would say and of parting with her. do next.

"Then you will not go away from me again," said Tessa, after they had walked a few steps, "and you will take me to where you live." She spoke meditatively, and not in a questioning tone. But presently she added, "I must go back once to the madre, though, to tell her I brought the cocoons, and that I'm married, and shall not go back again."

Tito felt the necessity of speaking now; and, in the rapid thought prompted by that necessity, he saw that by undeceiving Tessa he should be robbing himself of some at least of that pretty trustfulness which might, by-and-by, be his only haven from contempt. It would spoil Tessa to make her the least particle wiser or more suspicious.

“Yes, my little Tessa,” he said, caressingly, "you must go back to the madre; but you must not tell her you are married-you must keep that a secret from every body; else some very great harm would happen to me, and you would never see me again."

"And not come back? Oh, where do you go?" Tessa's mind had never formed an image of his whereabout or his doings when she did not see him: he had vanished, and her thought, instead of following him, had staid in the same spot where he was with her.

"I shall come back some time, Tessa," said Tito, taking her under the cloisters to the door of the church. "You must not cry-you must go to sleep when you have said your beads. And here is money to buy your breakfast. Now kiss me, and look happy; else I shall not come again."

She made a great effort over herself as she put up her lips to kiss him, and submitted to be gently turned round, with her face toward the door of the church. Tito saw her enter; and then, with a shrug at his own resolution, leaned against a pillar, took off his cap, rubbed his hair backward, and wondered where Romola was now, and what she was thinking of him. Poor little Tessa had disappeared behind the curtain among the crowd of contadine; but the love which formed

She looked up at him with pale fear in her one web with all his worldly hopes-with the

face.

ambitions and pleasures that must make the sol

The next moment her eyes met Fra Luca's as they looked up at her from the crucifix, and she was absorbed in that pang of recognition which identified this monkish emaciated form with the image of her fair young brother.

id part of his days-the love that was identified | with his larger self-was not to be banished from his consciousness. Even to the man who presents the most elastic resistance to whatever is unpleasant there will come moments when the pressure from without is too strong for him, and he must feel the smart and the bruise in spite of himself. Such a moment had come to Tito. There was no possible attitude of mind, no scheme of action, by which the uprooting of all his new-ble repulsion for her in that monkish aspect; it ly-planted hopes could be made otherwise than painful.

CHAPTER XV.

THE DYING MESSAGE.

WHEN Romola arrived at the entrance of San Marco she found one of the Frati waiting there in expectation of her arrival. Monna Brigida retired into the adjoining church, and Romola was conducted to the door of the chapter-house in the outer cloister, whither the invalid had been conveyed; no woman being allowed admission beyond this precinct.

When the door opened the subdued external light blending with that of two tapers placed behind a truckle-bed showed the emaciated face of Fra Luca, with the tonsured crown of golden hair above it, and with deep-sunken hazel eyes fixed on a small crucifix which he held before him. He was propped up into nearly a sitting posture; and Romola was just conscious, as she threw aside her veil, that there was another monk standing by the bed, with the black cowl drawn over his head, and that he moved toward the door as she entered; just conscious that in the back-ground there was a crucified form rising high and pale on the frescoed wall, and pale faces of sorrow looking out from it below.

E

"Dino!" she said, in a voice like a low cry of pain. But she did not bend toward him; she held herself erect, and paused at two yards' distance from him. There was an unconquera

seemed to her the brand of the dastardly undutifulness which had left her father desolateof the groveling superstition which could give such undutifulness the name of piety. Her father, whose proud sincerity and simplicity of life had made him one of the few frank pagans of his time, had brought her up with a silent ignoring of any claims the Church could have to regulate the belief and action of beings with a cultivated reason; the Church, in her mind, belonged to that actual life of the mixed multitude from which they had always lived apart, and she had no ideas that could render her brother's course an object of any other feeling than incurious, indignant contempt. Yet the lovingness of Romola's soul had clung to that image in the past, and while she stood rigidly aloof there was a yearning search in her eyes for something too faintly discernible.

But there was no corresponding emotion in the face of the monk. He looked at the little sister returned to him in her full womanly beauty, with the far-off gaze of a revisiting spirit.

"My sister!" he said, with feeble and interrupted but yet distinct utterance, "it is well thou hast not longer delayed to come, for I have a message to deliver to thee, and my time is short."

Romola took a step nearer: the message, she thought, would be one of affectionate penitence to her father, and her heart began to open. Nothing could wipe out the long years of desertion; but the culprit, looking back on those years with the sense of irremediable wrong committed, would call forth pity. Now, at the last, there would be understanding and forgiveness. Dino would pour out some natural filial feeling; he would ask questions about his father's blindness

how rapidly it had come on? how the long dark days had been filled? what the life was now in the home where he himself had been nourished?-and the last message from the dying lips would be one of tenderness and regret.

66 Romola," Fra Luca began again, "I have had a vision concerning thee. Thrice I have had it in the last two months: each time it has been clearer. Therefore I came from Fiesole, deeming it a message from heaven that I was bound to deliver. And I gather a promise of mercy to thee in this, that my breath is preserved in order to-"

The difficult breathing which continually interrupted him would not let him finish the sentence.

Romola had felt her heart chilling again. It

fore listen, and speak not again-for the time is a new state of passiveness. Her brother began short." to speak again.

Romola's mind recoiled strongly from listening to this vision. Her indignation had subsided, but it was only because she had felt the distance between her brother and herself widening. But while Fra Luca was speaking the figure of another monk had entered, and again stood on the other side of the bed, with the cowl drawn over his head.

"Romola, in the deep night, as I lay awake, I saw my father's room-the library—with all the books and the marbles and the leggio, where I used to stand and read; and I saw you-you were revealed to me as I see you now, pale, with long hair, sitting before my father's chair. And at the leggio stood a man whose face I could not see-I looked, and looked, and it was a blank "Kneel, my daughter, for the Angel of Death to me, even as a painting effaced; and I saw is present, and waits while the message of Heav-him move and take thee, Romola, by the hand; en is delivered: bend thy pride before it is bent for thee by a yoke of iron," said a strong rich voice, startlingly in contrast with Fra Luca's. The tone was not that of imperious command, but of quiet self-possession and assurance of the right, blended with benignity. Romola, vibrating to the sound, looked round at the figure on the opposite side of the bed. His face was hardly discernible under the shadow of the cowl, and her eyes fell at once on his hands, which were folded across his breast and lay in relief on the edge of his black mantle. They had a marked physiognomy which enforced the influence of the voice: they were very beautiful and almost of transparent delicacy. Romola's disposition to rebel against command, doubly active in the presence of monks, whom she had been taught to despise, would have fixed itself on any repulsive detail as a point of support. But the face was hidden, and the hands seemed to have an appeal in them against all hardness. The next moment the right hand took the crucifix to relieve the fatigued grasp of Fra Luca, and the left touched his lips with a wet sponge which lay near. In the act of bending the cowl was pushed back, and the features of the monk had the full light of the tapers on them. They were very marked features, such as lend themselves to popular description. There was the high arched nose, the prominent' under lip, the coronet of thick dark hair above the brow, all seeming to tell of energy and passion; there were the blue-gray eyes, shining mildly under auburn eyelashes, seeming, like the hands, to tell of acute sensitiveness. Romola felt certain they were the features of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, the prior of San Marco, whom she had chiefly thought of as more offensive than other monks, because he was more noisy. Her rebellion was rising against the first impression, which had almost forced her to bend her knees.

"Kneel, my daughter," the penetrating voice said again; "the pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul."

He was looking at her with mild fixedness while he spoke, and again she felt that subtle mysterious influence of a personality by which it has been given to some rare men to move their fellows.

Slowly Romola fell on her knees, and in the very act a tremor came over her; in the renunciation of her proud erectness, her mental attitude seemed changed, and she found herself in

|

and then I saw thee take my father by the hand, and you went all three down the stone steps into the streets, the man whose face was a blank to me leading the way. And you stood at the altar in Santa Croce, and the priest who married you had the face of death; and the graves opened, and the dead in their shrouds rose and followed you like a bridal train. And you passed on through the streets and the gates into the valley, and it seemed to me that he who led you hurried you more than you could bear, and the dead were weary of following you, and turned back to their graves. And at last you came to a stony place where there was no water, and no trees or herbage; but instead of water, I saw written parchment unrolling itself every where, and instead of trees and herbage I saw men of bronze and marble springing up and crowding round you; and my father was faint for want of water and fell to the ground; and the man whose face was a blank loosed thy hand and departed; and as he went I could see his face; and it was the face of the Great Tempter. And thou, Romola, didst wring thy hands and seek for water, and there was none. And the bronze and marble figures seemed to mock thee and hold out cups of water, and when thou didst grasp them and put them to my father's lips they turned to parchment. And the bronze and marble figures seemed to turn into demons and snatch my father's body from thee, and the parchments shriveled up, and blood ran every where instead of them, and fire upon the blood, till they all vanished, and the plain was bare and stony again, and thou wast alone in the midst of it. And then it seemed that the night fell and I saw no more......Thrice I have had that vision, Romola. I believe it is a revelation meant for thee-to warn thee against marriage as a temptation of the enemy-it calls upon thee to dedicate thyself"

His pauses had gradually become longer and more frequent, and he was now compelled to cease by a severe fit of gasping, in which his eyes were turned on the crucifix as on a light that was vanishing. Presently he found strength to speak again, but in a feebler, scarcely audible tone.

"To renounce the vain philosophy and corrupt thoughts of the heathens: for in the hour of sorrow and death their pride will turn to mockery, and the unclean gods will—”

The words died away.

In spite of the thought that was at work in Romola, telling her that this vision was no more