. What reasonable warrant
could she have had for believing in such a vision and acting on it?
None. True as the voice of foreboding had proved, Romola saw with
unshaken conviction that to have renounced Tito in obedience to a
warning like that, would have been meagre-hearted folly. Her trust had
been delusive, but she would have chosen over again to have acted on it
rather than be a creature led by phantoms and disjointed whispers in a
world where there was the large music of reasonable speech, and the warm
grasp of living hands.

But the persistent presence of these memories, linking themselves in her
imagination with her actual lot, gave her a glimpse of understanding
into the lives which had before lain utterly aloof from her sympathy--
the lives of the men and women who were led by such inward images and
voices.

"If they were only a little stronger in me," she said to herself, "I
should lose the sense of what that vision really was, and take it for a
prophetic light. I might in time get to be a seer of visions myself,
like the Suora Maddalena, and Camilla Rucellai, and the rest."

Romola shuddered at the possibility. All the instruction, all the main
influences of her life had gone to fortify her scorn of that sickly
superstition which led men and women, with eyes too weak for the
daylight, to sit in dark swamps and try to read human destiny by the
chance flame of wandering vapours.

And yet she was conscious of something deeper than that coincidence of
words which made the parting contact with her dying brother live anew in
her mind, and gave a new sisterhood to the wasted face. If there were
much more of such experience as his in the world, she would like to
understand it--would even like to learn the thoughts of men who sank in
ecstasy before the pictured agonies of martyrdom. There seemed to be
something more than madness in that supreme fellowship with suffering.
The springs were all dried up around her; she wondered what other waters
there were at which men drank and found strength in the desert. And
those moments in the Duomo when she had sobbed with a mysterious
mingling of rapture and pain, while Fra Girolamo offered himself a
willing sacrifice for the people, came back to her as if they had been a
transient taste of some such far-off fountain. But again she shrank
from impressions that were alluring her within the sphere of visions and
narrow fears which compelled men to outrage natural affec