will bring forward your mad assassin,
who is doubtless ready to obey your call, and you will tell the world
that you believe his testimony because he is so rational as to desire to
assassinate me. You will first inform the Signoria that I am a Medicean
conspirator, and then you will inform the Mediceans that I have betrayed
them, and in both cases you will offer the excellent proof that you
believe me capable in general of everything bad. It will certainly be a
striking position for a wife to adopt. And if, on such evidence, you
succeed in holding me up to infamy, you will have surpassed all the
heroines of the Greek drama."

He paused a moment, but she stood mute. He went on with the sense of
mastery.

"I believe you have no other grievance against me--except that I have
failed in fulfilling some lofty indefinite conditions on which you gave
me your wifely affection, so that, by withdrawing it, you have gradually
reduced me to the careful supply of your wants as a fair Piagnone of
high condition and liberal charities. I think your success in gibbeting
me is not certain. But doubtless you would begin by winning the ear of
Messer Bernardo del Nero?"

"Why do I speak of anything?" cried Romola, in anguish, sinking on her
chair again. "It is hateful in me to be thinking of myself."

She did not notice when Tito left the room, or know how long it was
before the door opened to admit Monna Brigida. But in that instant she
started up and said--

"Cousin, we must go to San Marco directly. I must see my confessor, Fra
Salvestro."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note 1. The most recent, and in some respects the best, biographer of
Savonarola, Signor Villari, endeavours to show that the Law of Appeal
ultimately enacted, being wider than the law originally contemplated by
Savonarola, was a source of bitter annoyance to him, as a contrivance of
the aristocratic party for attaching to the measures of the popular
government the injurious results of licence. But in taking this view
the estimable biographer lost sight of the fact that, not only in his
sermons, but in a deliberately prepared book (the _Compendium
Revelationum_) written long after the Appeal had become law, Savonarola
enumerates among the benefits secured to Florence, "_the Appeal from the
Six Votes, advocated by me, for the greater security of the citizens_."

CHAPTER FIFTY NINE.

PLEADING.

The morn