ience. Still, there had been something peculiar in her lot:
her relation to her father had claimed unusual sacrifices from her
husband. Tito had once thought that his love would make those
sacrifices easy; his love had not been great enough for that. She was
not justified in resenting a self-delusion. No! resentment must not
rise: all endurance seemed easy to Romola rather than a state of mind in
which she would admit to herself that Tito acted unworthily. If she had
felt a new heartache in the solitary hours with her father through the
last months of his life, it had been by no inexcusable fault of her
husband's; and now--it was a hope that would make its presence felt even
in the first moments when her father's place was empty--there was no
longer any importunate claim to divide her from Tito; their young lives
would flow in one current, and their true marriage would begin.

But the sense of something like guilt towards her father in a hope that
grew out of his death, gave all the more force to the anxiety with which
she dwelt on the means of fulfilling his supreme wish. That piety
towards his memory was all the atonement she could make now for a
thought that seemed akin to joy at his loss. The laborious simple life,
pure from vulgar corrupting ambitions, embittered by the frustration of
the dearest hopes, imprisoned at last in total darkness--a long
seed-time without a harvest--was at an end now, and all that remained of
it besides the tablet in Sante Croce and the unfinished commentary on
Tito's text, was the collection of manuscripts and antiquities, the
fruit of half a century's toil and frugality. The fulfilment of her
father's lifelong ambition about this library was a sacramental
obligation for Romola.

The precious relic was safe from creditors, for when the deficit towards
their payment had been ascertained, Bernardo del Nero, though he was far
from being among the wealthiest Florentines, had advanced the necessary
sum of about a thousand florins--a large sum in those days--accepting a
lien on the collection as a security.

"The State will repay me," he had said to Romola, making light of the
service, which had really cost him some inconvenience. "If the cardinal
finds a building, as he seems to say he will, our Signoria may consent
to do the rest. I have no children, I can afford the risk."

But within the last ten days all hopes in the Medici had come to an end:
and the famous Medicean collecti