ul curl," she said, resisting the impulse to withdraw
her hand. "Lillo's curls will be like it, perhaps, for _his_ cheek,
too, is dark. And you never know where your husband goes to when he
leaves you?"

"No," said Tessa, putting back her treasures out of the children's way.
"But I know Messer San Michele takes care of him, for he gave him a
beautiful coat, all made of little chains; and if he puts that on,
nobody can kill him. And perhaps, if--"

Tessa hesitated a little, under a recurrence of that original dreamy
wonder about Romola which had been expelled by chatting contact--"if you
_were_ a saint, you would take care of him, too, because you have taken
care of me and Lillo."

An agitated flush came over Romola's face in the first moment of
certainty, but she had bent her cheek against Lillo's head. The feeling
that leaped out in that flush was something like exultation at the
thought that the wife's burden might be about to slip from her overladen
shoulders; that this little ignorant creature might prove to be Tito's
lawful wife. A strange exultation for a proud and high-born woman to
have been brought to! But it seemed to Romola as if that were the only
issue that would make duty anything else for her than an insoluble
problem. Yet she was not deaf to Tessa's last appealing words; she
raised her head, and said, in her clearest tones--

"I will always take care of you if I see you need me. But that
beautiful coat? your husband did not wear it when you were first
married? Perhaps he used not to be so long away from you then?"

"Ah, yes! he was. Much--much longer. So long, I thought he would never
come back. I used to cry. Oh me! I was beaten then; a long, long
while ago at Peretola, where we had the goats and mules."

"And how long had you been married before your husband had that
chain-coat?" said Romola, her heart beating faster and faster.

Tessa looked meditative, and began to count on her fingers, and Romola
watched the fingers as if they would tell the secret of her destiny.

"The chestnuts were ripe when we were married," said Tessa, marking off
her thumb and fingers again as she spoke; "and then again they were ripe
at Peretola before he came back, and then again, after that, on the
hill. And soon the soldiers came, and we heard the trumpets, and then
Naldo had the coat."

"You had been married more than two years. In which church were you
married?" said Romola, too entirely absorbe