elf what it was that was just now leading all
Florence by the ears. This morning, for the first time, she had been to
hear one of the Advent sermons in the Duomo. When Tito had left her,
she had formed a sudden resolution, and after visiting the spot where
her father was buried in Santa Croce, had walked on to the Duomo. The
memory of that last scene with Dino was still vivid within her whenever
she recalled it, but it had receded behind the experience and anxieties
of her married life. The new sensibilities and questions which it had
half awakened in her were quieted again by that subjection to her
husband's mind which is felt by every wife who loves her husband with
passionate devotedness and full reliance. She remembered the effect of
Fra Girolamo's voice and presence on her as a ground for expecting that
his sermon might move her in spite of his being a narrow-minded monk.
But the sermon did no more than slightly deepen her previous impression,
that this fanatical preacher of tribulations was after all a man towards
whom it might be possible for her to feel personal regard and reverence.
The denunciations and exhortations simply arrested her attention. She
felt no terror, no pangs of conscience: it was the roll of distant
thunder, that seemed grand, but could not shake her. But when she heard
Savonarola invoke martyrdom, she sobbed with the rest: she felt herself
penetrated with a new sensation--a strange sympathy with something apart
from all the definable interests of her life. It was not altogether
unlike the thrill which had accompanied certain rare heroic touches in
history and poetry; but the resemblance was as that between the memory
of music, and the sense of being possessed by actual vibrating
harmonies.

But that transient emotion, strong as it was, seemed to lie quite
outside the inner chamber and sanctuary of her life. She was not
thinking of Fra Girolamo now; she was listening anxiously for the step
of her husband. During these three months of their double solitude she
had thought of each day as an epoch in which their union might begin to
be more perfect. She was conscious of being sometimes a little too sad
or too urgent about what concerned her father's memory--a little too
critical or coldly silent when Tito narrated the things that were said
and done in the world he frequented--a little too hasty in suggesting
that by living quite simply as her father had done, they might become
rich eno