San Marco. And I will not cease to watch
over you. I will instruct my brother concerning you, that he may guide
you into that path of labour for the suffering and the hungry to which
you are called as a daughter of Florence in these times of hard need. I
desire to behold you among the feebler and more ignorant sisters as the
apple-tree among the trees of the forest, so that your fairness and all
natural gifts may be but as a lamp through which the Divine light shines
the more purely. I will go now and call your servant."

When Maso had been sent a little way in advance, Fra Salvestro came
forward, and Savonarola led Romola towards him. She had beforehand felt
an inward shrinking from a new guide who was a total stranger to her:
but to have resisted Savonarola's advice would have been to assume an
attitude of independence at a moment when all her strength must be drawn
from the renunciation of independence. And the whole bent of her mind
now was towards doing what was painful rather than what was easy. She
bowed reverently to Fra Salvestro before looking directly at him; but
when she raised her head and saw him fully, her reluctance became a
palpitating doubt. There are men whose presence infuses trust and
reverence; there are others to whom we have need to carry our trust and
reverence ready-made; and that difference flashed on Romola as she
ceased to have Savonarola before her, and saw in his stead Fra Salvestro
Maruffi. It was not that there was anything manifestly repulsive in Fra
Salvestro's face and manner, any air of hypocrisy, any tinge of
coarseness; his face was handsomer than Fra Girolamo's, his person a
little taller. He was the long-accepted confessor of many among the
chief personages in Florence, and had therefore had large experience as
a spiritual director. But his face had the vacillating expression of a
mind unable to concentrate itself strongly in the channel of one great
emotion or belief--an expression which is fatal to influence over an
ardent nature like Romola's. Such an expression is not the stamp of
insincerity; it is the stamp simply of a shallow soul, which will often
be found sincerely striving to fill a high vocation, sincerely composing
its countenance to the utterance of sublime formulas, but finding the
muscles twitch or relax in spite of belief, as prose insists on coming
instead of poetry to the man who has not the divine frenzy. Fra
Salvestro had a peculiar liability to vi