f
Savonarola's arrest, and of her husband's death. This Augustinian monk
had been in the stream of people who had followed the waggon with its
awful burthen into the Piazza, and he could tell her what was generally
known in Florence--that Tito had escaped from an assaulting mob by
leaping into the Arno, but had been murdered on the bank by an old man
who had long had an enmity against him. But Romola understood the
catastrophe as no one else did. Of Savonarola the monk told her, in
that tone of unfavourable prejudice which was usual in the Black
Brethren (Frati Neri) towards the brother who showed white under his
black, that he had confessed himself a deceiver of the people.

Romola paused no longer. That evening she was in Florence, sitting in
agitated silence under the exclamations of joy and wailing, mingled with
exuberant narrative, which were poured into her ears by Monna Brigida,
who had backslided into false hair in Romola's absence, but now drew it
off again and declared she would not mind being grey, if her dear child
would stay with her.

Romola was too deeply moved by the main events which she had known
before coming to Florence, to be wrought upon by the doubtful gossiping
details added in Brigida's narrative. The tragedy of her husband's
death, of Fra Girolamo's confession of duplicity under the coercion of
torture, left her hardly any power of apprehending minor circumstances.
All the mental activity she could exert under that load of awe-stricken
grief, was absorbed by two purposes which must supersede every other; to
try and see Savonarola, and to learn what had become of Tessa and the
children.

"Tell me, cousin," she said abruptly, when Monna Brigida's tongue had
run quite away from troubles into projects of Romola's living with her,
"has anything been seen or said since Tito's death of a young woman with
two little children?"

Brigida started, rounded her eyes, and lifted up her hands.

"Cristo! no. What! was he so bad as that, my poor child? Ah, then,
that was why you went away, and left me word only that you went of your
own free will. Well, well; if I'd known that, I shouldn't have thought
you so strange and flighty. For I did say to myself, though I didn't
tell anybody else, `What was she to go away from her husband for,
leaving him to mischief, only because they cut poor Bernardo's head off?
She's got her father's temper,' I said, `that's what it is.' Well,
well; never scold me, c