away again, and said, in a
subdued voice--

"Excuse me; is it not true--you are young?"

"I am three-and-twenty," said Tito.

"Ah," said Bardo, still in a tone of subdued excitement, "and you had,
doubtless, a father who cared for your early instruction--who, perhaps,
was himself a scholar?"

There was a slight pause before Tito's answer came to the ear of Bardo;
but for Romola and Nello it began with a slight shock that seemed to
pass through him, and cause a momentary quivering of the lip; doubtless
at the revival of a supremely painful remembrance.

"Yes," he replied, "at least a father by adoption. He was a Neapolitan,
and of accomplished scholarship, both Latin and Greek. But," added
Tito, after another slight pause, "he is lost to me--was lost on a
voyage he too rashly undertook to Delos."

Bardo sank backward again, too delicate to ask another question that
might probe a sorrow which he divined to be recent. Romola, who knew
well what were the fibres that Tito's voice had stirred in her father,
felt that this new acquaintance had with wonderful suddenness got within
the barrier that lay between them and the alien world. Nello, thinking
that the evident check given to the conversation offered a graceful
opportunity for relieving himself from silence, said--

"In truth, it is as clear as Venetian glass that this fine young man has
had the best training; for the two Cennini have set him to work at their
Greek sheets already, and it seems to me they are not men to begin
cutting before they have felt the edge of their tools; they tested him
well beforehand, we may be sure, and if there are two things not to be
hidden--love and a cough--I say there is a third, and that is ignorance,
when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
The _tonsor inequalis_ is inevitably betrayed when he takes the shears
in his hand; is it not true, Messer Bardo? I speak after the fashion of
a barber, but, as Luigi Pulci says--

"`Perdonimi s'io fallo: chi m'ascolta
Intenda il mio volgar col suo latino.'"

"Nay, my good Nello," said Bardo, with an air of friendly severity, "you
are not altogether illiterate, and might doubtless have made a more
respectable progress in learning if you had abstained somewhat from the
_cicalata_ and gossip of the street-corner, to which our Florentines are
excessively addicted; but still more if you had not clogged your memory
with those frivolous productions of which