fe. He was struggling not against impending martyrdom, but against
impending ruin.

Therefore he looked and acted as if he were thoroughly confident, when
all the while foreboding was pressing with leaden weight on his heart,
not only because of the probable issues of this trial, but because of
another event already past--an event which was spreading a sunny
satisfaction through the mind of a man who was looking down at the
passion-worn prophet from a window of the Old Palace. It was a common
turning-point towards which those widely-sundered lives had been
converging, that two evenings ago the news had come that the Florentine
courier of the Ten had been arrested and robbed of all his despatches,
so that Savonarola's letter was already in the hands of the Duke of
Milan, and would soon be in the hands of the Pope, not only heightening
rage, but giving a new justification to extreme measures. There was no
malignity in Tito Melema's satisfaction: it was the mild
self-gratulation of a man who has won a game that has employed
hypothetic skill, not a game that has stirred the muscles and heated the
blood. Of course that bundle of desires and contrivances called human
nature, when moulded into the form of a plain-featured Frate
Predicatore, more or less of an impostor, could not be a pathetic object
to a brilliant-minded scholar who understood everything. Yet this
tonsured Girolamo with the high nose and large under lip was an
immensely clever Frate, mixing with his absurd superstitions or
fabrications very remarkable notions about government: no babbler, but a
man who could keep his secrets. Tito had no more spite against him than
against Saint Dominic. On the contrary, Fra Girolamo's existence had
been highly convenient to Tito Melema, furnishing him with that round of
the ladder from which he was about to leap on to a new and smooth
footing very much to his heart's content. And everything now was in
forward preparation for that leap: let one more sun rise and set, and
Tito hoped to quit Florence. He had been so industrious that he felt at
full leisure to amuse himself with to-day's comedy, which the
thick-headed Dolfo Spini could never have brought about but for him.

Not yet did the loud chanting cease, but rather swelled to a deafening
roar, being taken up in all parts of the Piazza by the Piagnoni, who
carried their little red crosses as a badge, and, most of them, chanted
the prayer for the confusion of God's