passed on to the tribunal of
the Papal Commissaries, who were to pronounce them schismatics and
heretics. Did not the prophet look like a schismatic and heretic now?
It is easy to believe in the damnable state of a man who stands stripped
and degraded.

Then the third tribunal was passed--that of the Florentine officials who
were to pronounce sentence, and amongst whom, even at her distance,
Romola could discern the odious figure of Dolfo Spini, indued in the
grave black lucco, as one of the Eight.

Then the three figures, in their close white raiment, trod their way
along the platform, amidst yells and grating tones of insult.

"Cover your eyes, Madonna," said Jacopo Nardi; "Fra Girolamo will be the
last."

It was not long before she had to uncover them again. Savonarola was
there. He was not far off her now. He had mounted the steps; she could
see him look round on the multitude.

But in the same moment expectation died, and she only saw what he was
seeing--torches waving to kindle the fuel beneath his dead body, faces
glaring with a yet worse light; she only heard what _he_ was hearing--
gross jests, taunts, and curses.

The moment was past. Her face was covered again, and she only knew that
Savonarola's voice had passed into eternal silence.

EPILOGUE.

On the evening of the 22nd of May 1509, five persons, of whose history
we have known something, were seated in a handsome upper room opening on
to a loggia which, at its right-hand corner, looked all along the Borgo
Pinti, and over the city gate towards Fiesole and the solemn heights
beyond it.

At one end of the room was an archway opening into a narrow inner room,
hardly more than a recess, where the light fell from above on a small
altar covered with fair white linen. Over the altar was a picture,
discernible at the distance where the little party sat only as the small
full-length portrait of a Dominican Brother. For it was shaded from the
light above by overhanging branches and wreaths of flowers, and the
fresh tapers below it were unlit. But it seemed that the decoration of
the altar and its recess was not complete. For part of the floor was
strewn with a confusion of flowers and green boughs, and among them sat
a delicate blue-eyed girl of thirteen, tossing her long light-brown hair
out of her eyes, as she made selections for the wreaths she was weaving,
or looked up at her mother's work in the same kind, and told her how to
do it with