ike
the sad heirship of some fallen greatness, or to the life of recovered
power? Surely the last, for the events of the night all came back to
him: the recognition of the page in Pausanias, the crowding resurgence
of facts and names, the sudden wide prospect which had given him such a
moment as that of the Maenad in the glorious amaze of her morning waking
on the mountain top.

He took up the book again, he read, he remembered without reading. He
saw a name, and the images of deeds rose with it: he saw the mention of
a deed, and he linked it with a name. There were stories of inexpiable
crimes, but stories also of guilt that seemed successful. There were
sanctuaries for swift-footed miscreants: baseness had its armour, and
the weapons of justice sometimes broke against it. What then? If
baseness triumphed everywhere else, if it could heap to itself all the
goods of the world and even hold the keys of hell, it would never
triumph over the hatred which it had itself awakened. It could devise
no torture that would seem greater than the torture of submitting to its
smile. Baldassarre felt the indestructible independent force of a
supreme emotion, which knows no terror, and asks for no motive, which is
itself an ever-burning motive, consuming all other desire. And now in
this morning light, when the assurance came again that the fine fibres
of association were active still, and that his recovered self had not
departed, all his gladness was but the hope of vengeance.

From that time till the evening on which we have seen him enter the
Rucellai gardens, he had been incessantly, but cautiously, inquiring
into Tito's position and all his circumstances, and there was hardly a
day on which he did not contrive to follow his movements. But he wished
not to arouse any alarm in Tito: he wished to secure a moment when the
hated favourite of blind fortune was at the summit of confident ease,
surrounded by chief men on whose favour he depended. It was not any
retributive payment or recognition of himself for his own behoof, on
which Baldassarre's whole soul was bent: it was to find the sharpest
edge of disgrace and shame by which a selfish smiler could be pierced;
it was to send through his marrow the most sudden shock of dread. He
was content to lie hard, and live stintedly--he had spent the greater
part of his remaining money in buying another poniard: his hunger and
his thirst were after nothing exquisite but an exquisit