r as far as Bologna, and then send him
back with letters to her godfather and Tito, telling them that she was
gone and never meant to return. She had planned her departure so that
its secrecy might be perfect, and her broken love and life be hidden
away unscanned by vulgar eyes. Bernardo del Nero had been absent at his
villa, willing to escape from political suspicions to his favourite
occupation of attending to his land, and she had paid him the debt
without a personal interview. He did not even know that the library was
sold, and was left to conjecture that some sudden piece of good fortune
had enabled Tito to raise this sum of money. Maso had been taken into
her confidence only so far that he knew her intended journey was a
secret; and to do just what she told him was the thing he cared most for
in his withered wintry age.

Romola did not mean to go to bed that night. When she had fastened the
door she took her taper to the carved and painted chest which contained
her wedding-clothes. The white silk and gold lay there, the long white
veil and the circlet of pearls. A great sob rose as she looked at them:
they seemed the shroud of her dead happiness. In a tiny gold loop of
the circlet a sugar-plum had lodged--a pink hailstone from the shower of
sweets: Tito had detected it first, and had said that it should always
remain there. At certain moments--and this was one of them--Romola was
carried, by a sudden wave of memory, back again into the time of perfect
trust, and felt again the presence of the husband whose love made the
world as fresh and wonderful to her as to a little child that sits in
stillness among the sunny flowers: heard the gentle tones and saw the
soft eyes without any lie in them, and breathed again that large freedom
of the soul which comes from the faith that the being who is nearest to
us is greater than ourselves. And in those brief moments the tears
always rose: the woman's lovingness felt something akin to what the
bereaved mother feels when the tiny fingers seem to lie warm on her
bosom, and yet are marble to her lips as she bends over the silent bed.

But there was something else lying in the chest besides the
wedding-clothes: it was something dark and coarse, rolled up in a close
bundle. She turned away her eyes from the white and gold to the dark
bundle, and as her hands touched the serge, her tears began to be
checked. That coarse roughness recalled her fully to the present, from