last from necessity; who sat among his books
and manuscripts, and saw them only by the light of those far-off younger
days which still shone in his memory.

And among his books and antiquities and rare marble fragments, in a
spacious room surrounded with laden shelves, Romola was his daily
companion and assistant. There was a time when he had hoped that his
son, Dino, would have followed in his steps, to be the prop of his age,
and to take up and continue his scholarly labours after he was dead. But
Dino had failed him; Dino had given himself up to religion and entered
the priesthood, and the passion of Bardo's resentment had flamed into
fierce hatred towards this recreant son of his, and none dared so much
as to name him within his hearing.

Maso, the old serving-man ushered in the two visitors he had announced a
few minutes previously, and Nello introduced Tito to Bardo and his
daughter as a scholar of considerable learning.

Romola's astonishment could hardly have been greater if the stranger had
worn a panther-skin and carried a thyrsus, for the cunning barber had
said nothing of the Greeks age or appearance, and among her father's
scholarly visitors she had hardly ever seen any but gray-headed men.

Nevertheless, she returned Tito's bow with the same pale, proud face as
ever; but as he approached the snow melted, and when he ventured to look
towards her again a pink flush overspread her face, to vanish again
almost immediately, as if her imperious will had recalled it. Tito's
glance, on the other hand, as he looked at this tall maiden of seventeen
or eighteen, as she stood at the reading-desk with one hand on the back
of her father's chair, had that gentle, beseeching admiration in it
which is the most propitiating of appeals to a proud, shy woman, and is
perhaps the only atonement a man can make for being too handsome.

"Messere, I give you welcome," said Bardo with some condescension;
"misfortune wedded to learning, and especially to Greek learning, is a
letter of credit that should win the ear of every instructed
Florentine."

He proceeded to question Tito as to what part of Greece he came from,
learned that he was a young man of unusual scholastic attainments, and
that he had a father who was himself a scholar.

"At least," said Tito, "a father by adoption. He was a Neapolitan, but,"
he added, after another slight pause, "he is lost to me--was lost on a
voyage he too rashly undertook to Delos."

Bardo