ground.

"My husband--he is not--my love is gone!"

"My daughter, there is the bond of a higher love. Marriage is not
carnal only, made for selfish delight. See what that thought leads you
to! It leads you to wander away in a false garb from all the
obligations of your place and name. That would not have been if you had
learned that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God can
release you. My daughter, your life is not as a grain of sand, to be
blown by the winds; it is as flesh and blood, that dies if it be
sundered. Your husband is not a malefactor?"

Romola flushed and started. "Heaven forbid! No; I accuse him of
nothing."

"I did not suppose he was a malefactor. I meant that if he were a
malefactor your place would be in the prison beside him. My daughter,
if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife. You
may say, 'I will forsake my husband,' but you cannot cease to be a
wife."

"Yet if--oh, how could I bear--" Romola had involuntarily begun to say
something which she sought to banish from her mind again.

"Make your marriage sorrows an offering, too, my daughter: an offering
to the great work by which sin and sorrow are being made to cease.
The end is sure, and is already beginning. Here in Florence it is
beginning, and the eyes of faith behold it. And it may be our
blessedness to die for it: to die daily by the crucifixion of our
selfish will--to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar. My
daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfil the duties of that great
inheritance. Live for Florence--for your own people, whom God is
preparing to bless the earth. Bear the anguish and the smart. The iron
is sharp--I know, I know--it rends the tender flesh. The draught is
bitterness on the lips. But there is rapture in the cup--there is the
vision which makes all life below it dross forever. Come, my daughter,
come back to your place!" [Footnote: Chapter XL.]

Again, when Dorothea goes to see Rosamond to intercede in Dr. Lydgate's
behalf with his wife, we have an expression of the sacredness of marriage,
and the renunciation it demands of all that is opposed to its trust and
helpfulness. Dorothea says,--

"Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful
in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better
than--than th