her 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.

Both these events tended to arrest her incipient alienation from the
Frate, and to rivet again her attachment to the man who had opened to
her the new life of duty, and who seemed now to be worsted in the fight
for principle against profligacy. For Romola could not carry from day
to day into the abodes of pestilence and misery the sublime excitement
of a gladness that, since such anguish existed, she too existed to make
some of the anguish less bitter, without remembering that she owed this
transcendent moral life to Fra Girolamo. She could not witness the
silencing and excommunication of a 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.

Far on in the hot days of June 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 towards 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 were the bare walls at
evening made more sombre by the glimmer of tapers; there was the black
and grey 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 ardour on the side of the Frate was doubly strengthened by the
gleeful triumph she saw in hard and coarse faces, and by the
fear-stricken confusion in the faces and speech of many among his
strongly-attached friends. The question where the duty of obedie