So changed, Tito! It pierced me to think that it was Dino. And so
strangely hard: not a word to my father; nothing but a vision that he
wanted to tell me. And yet it was so piteous--the struggling breath,
and the eyes that seemed to look towards the crucifix, and yet not to
see it. I shall never forget it; it seems as if it would come between
me and everything I shall look at."

Romola's heart swelled again, so that she was forced to break off. But
the need she felt to disburden her mind to Tito urged her to repress the
rising anguish. When she began to speak again, her thoughts had
travelled a little.

"It was strange, Tito. The vision was about our marriage, and yet he
knew nothing of you."

"What was it, my Romola? Sit down and tell me," said Tito, leading her
to the bench that stood near. A fear had come across him lest the
vision should somehow or other relate to Baldassarre; and this sudden
change of feeling prompted him to seek a change of position.

Romola told him all that had passed, from her entrance into San Marco,
hardly leaving out one of her brother's words, which had burnt
themselves into her memory as they were spoken. But when she was at the
end of the vision, she paused; the rest came too vividly before her to
be uttered, and she sat looking at the distance, almost unconscious for
the moment that Tito was near her. _His_ mind was at ease now; that
vague vision had passed over him like white mist, and left no mark. But
he was silent, expecting her to speak again.

"I took it," she went on, as if Tito had been reading her thoughts; "I
took the crucifix; it is down below in my bedroom."

"And now, my Romola," said Tito, entreatingly, "you will banish these
ghastly thoughts. The vision was an ordinary monkish vision, bred of
fasting and fanatical ideas. It surely has no weight with you."

"No, Tito; no. But poor. Dino, _he_ believed it was a divine message.
It is strange," she went on meditatively, "this life of men possessed
with fervid beliefs that seem like madness to their fellow-beings. Dino
was not a vulgar fanatic; and that Fra Girolamo--his very voice seems to
have penetrated me with a sense that there is some truth in what moves
them: some truth of which I know nothing."

"It was only because your feelings were highly wrought, my Romola. Your
brother's state of mind was no more than a form of that theosophy which
has been the common disease of excitable dreamy minds in a