he brand of the dastardly
undutifulness which had left her father desolate--of the grovelling
superstition which could give such undutifulness the name of piety. Her
father, whose proud sincerity and simplicity of life had made him one of
the few frank pagans of his time, had brought her up with a silent
ignoring of any claims the Church could have to regulate the belief and
action of beings with a cultivated reason. The Church, in her mind,
belonged to that actual life of the mixed multitude from which they had
always lived apart, and she had no ideas that could render her brother's
course an object of any other feeling than incurious, indignant
contempt. Yet the lovingness of Romola's soul had clung to that image
in the past, and while she stood rigidly aloof, there was a yearning
search in her eyes for something too faintly discernible.

But there was no corresponding emotion in the face of the monk. He
looked at the little sister returned to him in her full womanly beauty,
with the far-off gaze of a revisiting spirit.

"My sister!" he said, with a feeble and interrupted but yet distinct
utterance, "it is well thou hast not longer delayed to come, for I have
a message to deliver to thee, and my time is short."

Romola took a step nearer: the message, she thought, would be one of
affectionate penitence to her father, and her heart began to open.
Nothing could wipe out the long years of desertion; but the culprit,
looking back on those years with the sense of irremediable wrong
committed, would call forth pity. Now, at the last, there would be
understanding and forgiveness. Dino would pour out some natural filial
feeling; he would ask questions about his father's blindness--how
rapidly it had come on? how the long dark days had been filled? what the
life was now in the home where he himself had been nourished?--and the
last message from the dying lips would be one of tenderness and regret.

"Romola," Fra Luca began, "I have had a vision concerning thee. Thrice
I have had it in the last two months: each time it has been clearer.
Therefore I came from Fiesole, deeming it a message from heaven that I
was bound to deliver. And I gather a promise of mercy to thee in this,
that my breath is preserved in order to--"

The difficult breathing which continually interrupted him would not let
him finish the sentence.

Romola had felt her heart chilling again. It was a vision, then, this
message--one of those visions