ured. The opportunity was there,
and it raised an inclination which hemmed in the calculating activity of
his thought. He started up, and stepped towards the door; but Tessa's
cry, as she dropped her beads, roused him from his absorption. He
turned and said--

"My Tessa, get me a lantern; and don't cry, little pigeon, I am not
angry."

They went down the stairs, and Tessa was going to shout the need of the
lantern in Monna Lisa's ear, when Tito, who had opened the door, said,
"Stay, Tessa--no, I want no lantern: go upstairs again, and keep quiet,
and say nothing to Monna Lisa."

In half a minute he stood before the closed door of the outhouse, where
the moon was shining white on the old paintless wood.

In this last decisive moment, Tito felt a tremor upon him--a sudden
instinctive shrinking from a possible tiger-glance, a possible
tiger-leap. Yet why should he, a young man, be afraid of an old one? a
young man with armour on, of an old man without a weapon? It was but a
moment's hesitation, and Tito laid his hand on the door. Was his father
asleep? Was there nothing else but the door that screened him from the
voice and the glance which no magic could turn into ease?

Baldassarre was not asleep. There was a square opening high in the wall
of the hovel, through which the moonbeams sent in a stream of pale
light; and if Tito could have looked through the opening, he would have
seen his father seated on the straw, with something that shone like a
white star in his hand. Baldassarre was feeling the edge of his
poniard, taking refuge in that sensation from a hopeless blank of
thought that seemed to lie like a great gulf between his passion and its
aim.

He was in one of his most wretched moments of conscious helplessness: he
had been poring, while it was light, over the book that lay open beside
him; then he had been trying to recall the names of his jewels, and the
symbols engraved on them; and though at certain other times he had
recovered some of those names and symbols, to-night they were all gone
into darkness. And this effort at inward seeing had seemed to end in
utter paralysis of memory. He was reduced to a sort of mad
consciousness that he was a solitary pulse of just rage in a world
filled with defiant baseness. He had clutched and unsheathed his
dagger, and for a long while had been feeling its edge, his mind
narrowed to one image, and the dream of one sensation--the sensation of
plunging that