illness had come from which he had risen with body
and mind so shattered that he was worse than worthless to his owners,
except for the sake of the ransom that did not come. Then, as he sat
helpless in the morning sunlight, he began to think, "Tito has been
drowned, or they have made _him_ a prisoner too. I shall see him no
more. He set out after me, but misfortune overtook him. I shall see
his face no more." Sitting in his new feebleness and despair,
supporting his head between his hands, with blank eyes and lips that
moved uncertainly, he looked so much like a hopelessly imbecile old man,
that his owners were contented to be rid of him, and allowed a Genoese
merchant, who had compassion on him as an Italian, to take him on board
his galley. In a voyage of many months in the Archipelago and along the
seaboard of Asia Minor, Baldassarre had recovered his bodily strength,
but on landing at Genoa he had so weary a sense of his desolateness that
he almost wished he had died of that illness at Corinth. There was just
one possibility that hindered the wish from being decided: it was that
Tito might not be dead, but living in a state of imprisonment or
destitution; and if he lived, there was still a hope for Baldassarre--
faint, perhaps, and likely to be long deferred, but still a hope, that
he might find his child, his cherished son again; might yet again clasp
hands and meet face to face with the one being who remembered him as he
had been before his mind was broken. In this state of feeling he had
chanced to meet the stranger who wore Tito's onyx ring, and though
Baldassarre would have been unable to describe the ring beforehand, the
sight of it stirred the dormant fibres, and he recognised it. That Tito
nearly a year after his father had been parted from him should have been
living in apparent prosperity at Florence, selling the gem which he
ought not to have sold till the last extremity, was a fact that
Baldassarre shrank from trying to account for: he was glad to be stunned
and bewildered by it, rather than to have any distinct thought; he tried
to feel nothing but joy that he should behold Tito again. Perhaps Tito
had thought that his father was dead; somehow the mystery would be
explained. "But at least I shall meet eyes that will remember me. I am
not alone in the world."

And now again Baldassarre said, "I am not alone in the world; I shall
never be alone, for my revenge is with me."

It was as the inst