it
intelligible that they belonged to the same world? Or was there never
any reconciling of them, but only a blind worship of clashing deities,
first in mad joy and then in wailing? Romola for the first time felt
this questioning need like a sudden uneasy dizziness and want of
something to grasp; it was an experience hardly longer than a sigh, for
the eager theorising of ages is compressed, as in a seed, in the
momentary want of a single mind. But there was no answer to meet the
need, and it vanished before the returning rush of young sympathy with
the glad loving beauty that beamed upon her in new radiance, like the
dawn after we have looked away from it to the grey west.

"Your mind lingers apart from our love, my Romola," Tito said, with a
soft reproachful murmur. "It seems a forgotten thing to you."

She looked at the beseeching eyes in silence, till the sadness all
melted out of her own.

"My joy!" she said, in her full clear voice.

"Do you really care for me enough, then, to banish those chill fancies,
or shall you always be suspecting me as the Great Tempter?" said Tito,
with his bright smile.

"How should I not care for you more than for everything else?
Everything I had felt before in all my life--about my father, and about
my loneliness--was a preparation to love you. You would laugh at me,
Tito, if you knew what sort of man I used to think I should marry--some
scholar with deep lines in his face, like Alamanno Rinuccini, and with
rather grey hair, who would agree with my father in taking the side of
the Aristotelians, and be willing to live with him. I used to think
about the love I read of in the poets, but I never dreamed that anything
like that could happen to me here in Florence in our old library. And
then _you_ came, Tito, and were so much to my father, and I began to
believe that life could be happy for me too."

"My goddess! is there any woman like you?" said Tito, with a mixture of
fondness and wondering admiration at the blended majesty and simplicity
in her.

"But, dearest," he went on, rather timidly, "if you minded more about
our marriage, you would persuade your father and Messer Bernardo not to
think of any more delays. But you seem not to mind about it."

"Yes, Tito, I will, I do mind. But I am sure my godfather will urge
more delay now, because of Dino's death. He has never agreed with my
father about disowning Dino, and you know he has always said that we
ought to wait u