nsistent with lenity in the present case."

"I know, I know," said Romola, with a look and tone of pain. "But he is
driven into those excesses of speech. It used to be different. I
_will_ ask for an interview. I cannot rest without it. I trust in the
greatness of his heart."

She was not looking at Tito; her eyes were bent with a vague gaze
towards the ground, and she had no distinct consciousness that the words
she heard came from her husband.

"Better lose no time, then," said Tito, with unmixed suavity, moving his
cap round in his hands as if he were about to put it on and depart.
"And now, Romola, you will perhaps be able to see, in spite of
prejudice, that my wishes go with yours in this matter. You will not
regard the misfortune of my safety as an offence."

Something like an electric shock passed through Romola: it was the full
consciousness of her husband's presence returning to her. She looked at
him without speaking.

"At least," he added, in a slightly harder tone, "you will endeavour to
base our intercourse on some other reasonings than that because an evil
deed is possible, _I_ have done it. Am I alone to be beyond the pale of
your extensive charity?"

The feeling which had been driven back from Romola's lips a fortnight
before rose again with the gathered force of a tidal wave. She spoke
with a decision which told him that she was careless of consequences.

"It is too late, Tito. There is no killing the suspicion that deceit
has once begotten. And now I know everything. I know who that old man
was: he was your father, to whom you owe everything--to whom you owe
more than if you had been his own child. By the side of that, it is a
small thing that you broke my trust and my father's. As long as you
deny the truth about that old man, there is a horror rising between us:
the law that should make us one can never be obeyed. I too am a human
being. I have a soul of my own that abhors your actions. Our union is
a pretence--as if a perpetual lie could be a sacred marriage."

Tito did not answer immediately. When he did speak it was with a
calculated caution, that was stimulated by alarm.

"And you mean to carry out that independence by quitting me, I presume?"

"I desire to quit you," said Romola, impetuously.

"And supposing I do not submit to part with what the law gives me some
security for retaining? You will then, of course, proclaim your reasons
in the ear of all Florence. You