committing one of the greatest wrongs a
woman and a citizen can be guilty of--withdrawing in secrecy and
disguise from a pledge which you have given in the face of God and your
fellow-men? Of what wrongs will you complain, when you yourself are
breaking the simplest law that lies at the foundation of the trust which
binds man to man--faithfulness to the spoken word? This, then, is the
wisdom you have gained by scorning the mysteries of the Church?--not to
see the bare duty of integrity, where the Church would have taught you
to see, not integrity only, but religion."

The blood had rushed to Romola's face, and she shrank as if she had been
stricken. "I would not have put on a disguise," she began; but she
could not go on,--she was too much shaken by the suggestion in the
Frate's words of a possible affinity between her own conduct and Tito's.

"And to break that pledge you fly from Florence: Florence, where there
are the only men and women in the world to whom you owe the debt of a
fellow-citizen."

"I should never have quitted Florence," said Romola, tremulously, "as
long as there was any hope of my fulfilling a duty to my father there."

"And do you own no tie but that of a child to her father in the flesh?
Your life has been spent in blindness, my daughter. You have lived with
those who sit on a hill aloof, and look down on the life of their
fellow-men. I know their vain discourse. It is of what has been in the
times which they fill with their own fancied wisdom, while they scorn
God's work in the present. And doubtless you were taught how there were
pagan women who felt what it was to live for the Republic; yet you have
never felt that you, a Florentine woman, should live for Florence. If
your own people are wearing a yoke, will you slip from under it, instead
of struggling with them to lighten it? There is hunger and misery in
our streets, yet you say, `I care not; I have my own sorrows; I will go
away, if peradventure I can ease them.' The servants of God are
struggling after a law of justice, peace, and charity, that the hundred
thousand citizens among whom you were born may be governed righteously;
but you think no more of this than if you were a bird, that may spread
its wings and fly whither it will in search of food to its liking. And
yet you have scorned the teaching of the Church, my daughter. As if
you, a wilful wanderer, following your own blind choice, were not below
the humblest Florentin