il he had some sign that
Baldassarre understood him. Perhaps his mind was too distempered or too
imbecile even for that: perhaps the shock of his fall and his
disappointed rage might have quite suspended the use of his faculties.

Presently Baldassarre began to move. He threw away the broken dagger,
and slowly and gradually, still trembling, began to raise himself from
the ground. Tito put out his hand to help him, and so strangely quick
are men's souls that in this moment, when he began to feel his atonement
was accepted, he had a darting thought of the irksome efforts it
entailed. Baldassarre clutched the hand that was held out, raised
himself and clutched it still, going close up to Tito till their faces
were not a foot off each other. Then he began to speak, in a deep
trembling voice--

"I saved you--I nurtured you--I loved you. You forsook me--you robbed
me--you denied me. What can you give me? You have made the world
bitterness to me; but there is one draught of sweetness left--_that you
shall know agony_."

He let fall Tito's hand, and going backwards a little, first rested his
arm on a projecting stone in the wall, and then sank again in a sitting
posture on the straw. The outleap of fury in the dagger-thrust had
evidently exhausted him.

Tito stood silent. If it had been a deep yearning-emotion which had
brought him to ask his father's forgiveness, the denial of it might have
caused him a pang which would have excluded the rushing train of thought
that followed those decisive words. As it was, though the sentence of
unchangeable hatred grated on him and jarred him terribly, his mind
glanced round with a self-preserving instinct to see how far those words
could have the force of a substantial threat. When he had come down to
speak to Baldassarre, he had said to himself that if his effort at
reconciliation failed, things would only be as they had been before.
The first glance of his mind was backward to that thought again, but the
future possibilities of danger that were conjured up along with it
brought the perception that things were _not_ as they had been before,
and the perception came as a triumphant relief. There was not only the
broken dagger, there was the certainty, from what Tessa had told him,
that Baldassarre's mind was broken too, and had no edge that could reach
him. Tito felt he had no choice now: he must defy Baldassarre as a mad,
imbecile old man; and the chances were so strongl