e sight of some generous self-risking deed. We feel no doubt then
what is the highest prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our own
power to attain it. By a new current of such enthusiasm Romola was
helped through these difficult summer days. She had ventured on no
words to Tito that would apprise him of her late interview with
Baldassarre, and the revelation he had made to her. What would such
agitating, difficult words win from him? No admission of the truth;
nothing, probably, but a cool sarcasm about her sympathy with his
assassin. Baldassarre was evidently helpless: the thing to be feared
was, not that he should injure Tito, but that Tito, coming upon his
traces, should carry out some new scheme for ridding himself of the
injured man who was a haunting dread to him. Romola felt that she could
do nothing decisive until she had seen Baldassarre again, and learned
the full truth about that "other wife"--learned whether she were the
wife to whom Tito was first bound.

The possibilities about that other wife, which involved the worst wound
to her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly-embittering
suspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating away
the lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of her
husband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre's
revelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which would perhaps
have urged some passionate speech in spite of herself if he had not been
more than usually absent from home. Like many of the wealthier citizens
in that time of pestilence, he spent the intervals of business chiefly
in the country: the agreeable Melema was welcome at many villas, and
since Romola had refused to leave the city, he had no need to provide a
country residence of his own.

But at last, in the later days of July, the alleviation of those public
troubles which had absorbed her activity and much of her thought, left
Romola to a less counteracted sense of her personal lot. The Plague had
almost disappeared, and the position of Savonarola was made more hopeful
by a favourable magistracy, who were writing urgent vindicatory letters
to Rome on his behalf, entreating the withdrawal of the Excommunication.

Romola's healthy and vigorous frame was undergoing the reaction of
languor inevitable after continuous excitement and over-exertion; but
her mental restlessness would not allow her to remain at home without
peremptory occupa