ge.

At last the slow fisherman had gathered up all his movables and was
walking away. Soon the gold was shrinking and getting duskier in sea
and sky, and there was no living thing in sight, no sound but the
lulling monotony of the lapping waves. In this sea there was no tide
that would help to carry her away if she waited for its ebb; but Romola
thought the breeze from the land was rising a little. She got into the
boat, unfurled the sail, and fastened it as she had learned in that
first brief lesson. She saw that it caught the light breeze, and this
was all she cared for. Then she loosed the boat from its moorings, and
tried to urge it with an oar, till she was far out from the land, till
the sea was dark even to the west, and the stars were disclosing
themselves like a palpitating life over the wide heavens. Resting at
last, she threw back her cowl, and, taking off the kerchief underneath,
which confined her hair, she doubled them both under her head for a
pillow on one of the boat's ribs. The fair head was still very young
and could bear a hard pillow.

And so she lay, with the soft night air breathing on her while she
glided on the water and watched the deepening quiet of the sky. She was
alone now: she had freed herself from all claims, she had freed herself
even from that burden of choice which presses with heavier and heavier
weight when claims have loosed their guiding hold.

Had she found anything like the dream of her girlhood? No. Memories
hung upon her like the weight of broken wings that could never be
lifted--memories of human sympathy which even in its pains leaves a
thirst that the Great Mother has no milk to still. Romola felt orphaned
in those wide spaces of sea and sky. She read no message of love for
her in that far-off symbolic writing of the heavens, and with a great
sob she wished that she might be gliding into death.

She drew the cowl over her head again and covered her face, choosing
darkness rather than the light of the stars, which seemed to her like
the hard light of eyes that looked at her without seeing her. Presently
she felt that she was in the grave, but not resting there: she was
touching the hands of the beloved dead beside her, and trying to wake
them.

CHAPTER SIXTY TWO.

THE BENEDICTION.

About ten o'clock on the morning of the twenty-seventh of February the
currents of passengers along the Florentine streets set decidedly
towards San Marco. It was the l