ines the
feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth,
as easily as primitive people imagined the humours of the gods in fair
weather: what is she to believe in, if not in this vision woven from
within?

And Tito was really very far from feeling impatient. He delighted in
sitting there with the sense that Romola's attention was fixed on him,
and that he could occasionally look at her. He was pleased that Bardo
should take an interest in him; and he did not dwell with enough
seriousness on the prospect of the work in which he was to be aided, to
feel moved by it to anything else than that easy, good-humoured
acquiescence which was natural to him.

"I shall be proud and happy," he said, in answer to Bardo's last words,
"if my services can be held a meet offering to the matured scholarship
of Messere. But doubtless,"--here he looked towards Romola--"the lovely
damigella, your daughter, makes all other aid superfluous; for I have
learned from Nello that she has been nourished on the highest studies
from her earliest years."

"You are mistaken," said Romola; "I am by no means sufficient to my
father: I have not the gifts that are necessary for scholarship."

Romola did not make this self-depreciatory statement in a tone of
anxious humility, but with a proud gravity.

"Nay, my Romola," said her father, not willing that the stranger should
have too low a conception of his daughter's powers; "thou art not
destitute of gifts; rather, thou art endowed beyond the measure of
women; but thou hast withal the woman's delicate frame, which ever
craves repose and variety, and so begets a wandering imagination. My
daughter,"--turning to Tito--"has been very precious to me, filling up
to the best of her power the place of a son. For I had once a son..."

Bardo checked himself: he did not wish to assume an attitude of
complaint in the presence of a stranger, and he remembered that this
young man, in whom he had unexpectedly become so much interested, was
still a stranger, towards whom it became him rather to keep the position
of a patron. His pride was roused to double activity by the fear that
he had forgotten his dignity.

"But," he resumed, in his original tone of condescension, "we are
departing from what I believe is to you the most important business.
Nello informed me that you had certain gems which you would fain dispose
of, and that you desired a passport to some man of wealth and taste who