s confessor to follow the
guard that would lead him to the Bargello. Her heart was bent on
clinging to the presence of the childless old man to the last moment, as
her father would have done; and she had overpowered all remonstrances.
Giovan Battista Ridolfi, a disciple of Savonarola, who was going in
bitterness to behold the death of his elder brother Niccolo, had
promised that she should be guarded, and now stood by her side.

Tito, too, was in the palace; but Romola had not seen him. Since the
evening of the seventeenth they had avoided each other, and Tito only
knew by inference from the report of the Frate's neutrality that her
pleading had failed. He was now surrounded with official and other
personages, both Florentine and foreign, who had been awaiting the issue
of the long-protracted council, maintaining, except when he was directly
addressed, the subdued air and grave silence of a man whom actual events
are placing in a painful state of strife between public and private
feeling. When an allusion was made to his wife in relation to those
events, he implied that, owing to the violent excitement of her mind,
the mere fact of his continuing to hold office under a government
concerned in her godfather's condemnation, roused in her a diseased
hostility towards him; so that for her sake he felt it best not to
approach her.

"Ah, the old Bardi blood!" said Cennini, with a shrug. "I shall not be
surprised if this business shakes _her_ loose from the Frate, as well as
some others I could name."

"It is excusable in a woman, who is doubtless beautiful, since she is
the wife of Messer Tito," said a young French envoy, smiling and bowing
to Tito, "to think that her affections must overrule the good of the
State, and that nobody is to be beheaded who is anybody's cousin; but
such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population. It seems to
me your Florentine polity is much weakened by it."

"That is true," said Niccolo Macchiavelli; "but where personal ties are
strong, the hostilities they raise must be taken due account of. Many
of these half-way severities are mere hot-headed blundering. The only
safe blows to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are too
heavy to be avenged."

"Niccolo," said Cennini, "there is a clever wickedness in thy talk
sometimes that makes me mistrust thy pleasant young face as if it were a
mask of Satan."

"Not at all, my good Domenico," said Macchiavelli, smilin