ld man was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE.

WHAT FLORENCE WAS THINKING OF.

For several days Tito saw little of Romola. He told her gently, the
next morning, that it would be better for her to remove any small
articles of her own from the library, as there would be agents coming to
pack up the antiquities. Then, leaning to kiss her on the brow, he
suggested that she should keep in her own room where the little painted
tabernacle was, and where she was then sitting, so that she might be
away from the noise of strange footsteps, Romola assented quietly,
making no sign of emotion: the night had been one long waking to her,
and, in spite of her healthy frame, sensation had become a dull
continuous pain, as if she had been stunned and bruised. Tito divined
that she felt ill, but he dared say no more; he only dared, perceiving
that her hand and brow were stone cold, to fetch a furred mantle and
throw it lightly round her. And in every brief interval that he
returned to her, the scene was nearly the same: he tried to propitiate
her by some unobtrusive act or word of tenderness, and she seemed to
have lost the power of speaking to him, or of looking at him.
"Patience!" he said to himself. "She will recover it, and forgive at
last. The tie to me must still remain the strongest." When the
stricken person is slow to recover and look as if nothing had happened,
the striker easily glides into the position of the aggrieved party; he
feels no bruise himself, and is strongly conscious of his own amiable
behaviour since he inflicted the blow. But Tito was not naturally
disposed to feel himself aggrieved; the constant bent of his mind was
towards propitiation, and he would have submitted to much for the sake
of feeling Romola's hand resting on his head again, as it did that
morning when he first shrank from looking at her.

But he found it the less difficult to wait patiently for the return of
his home happiness, because his life out of doors was more and more
interesting to him. A course of action which is in strictness a
slowly-prepared outgrowth of the entire character, is yet almost always
traceable to a single impression as its point of apparent origin; and
since that moment in the Piazza del Duomo, when Tito, mounted on the
bales, had tasted a keen pleasure in the consciousness of his ability to
tickle the ears of men with any phrases that pleased them, his
imagination had glanced continually towards a sort of politica