dassarre's having met again with any one of that crew, and
Tito thought with bitterness that a timely, well-devised falsehood might
have saved him from any fatal consequences. But to have told that
falsehood would have required perfect self-command in the moment of a
convulsive shock: he seemed to have spoken without any preconception:
the words had leaped forth like a sudden birth that had been begotten
and nourished in the darkness.

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we
prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or
evil which gradually determines character.

There was but one chance for him now; the chance of Baldassarre's
failure in finding his revenge. And--Tito grasped at a thought more
actively cruel than any he had ever encouraged before: might not his own
unpremeditated words have some truth in them? Enough truth, at least,
to bear him out in his denial of any declaration Baldassarre might make
about him? The old man looked strange and wild; with his eager heart
and brain, suffering was likely enough to have produced madness. If it
were so, the vengeance that strove to inflict disgrace might be baffled.

But there was another form of vengeance not to be baffled by ingenious
lying. Baldassarre belonged to a race to whom the thrust of the dagger
seems almost as natural an impulse as the outleap of the tiger's talons.
Tito shrank with shuddering dread from disgrace; but he had also that
physical dread which is inseparable from a soft pleasure-loving nature,
and which prevents a man from meeting wounds and death as a welcome
relief from disgrace. His thoughts flew at once to some hidden
defensive armour that might save him from a vengeance which no subtlety
could parry.

He wondered at the power of the passionate fear that possessed him. It
was as if he had been smitten with a blighting disease that had suddenly
turned the joyous sense of young life into pain.

There was still one resource open to Tito. He might have turned back,
sought Baldassarre again, confessed everything to him--to Romola--to all
the world. But he never thought of that. The repentance which cuts off
all moorings to evil, demands something more than selfish fear. He had
no sense that there was strength and safety in truth; the only strength
he trusted to lay in his ingenuity and his dissimulation. Now that the
first shock, which had called up the traitorous signs of fear, was