round her said, "The
Holy Virgin be praised!"

"It was the procession!"

"The Mother of God has had pity on us!"

At last Romola rose from the heap of straw, too tired to try and smile
any longer, saying as she turned up the stone steps--

"I will come by-and-by, to bring you your dinner."

"Bless you, madonna! bless you!" said the faint chorus, in much the same
tone as that in which they had a few minutes before praised and thanked
the unseen Madonna.

Romola cared a great deal for that music. She had no innate taste for
tending the sick and clothing the ragged, like some women to whom the
details of such work are welcome in themselves, simply as an occupation.
Her early training had kept her aloof from such womanly labours; and if
she had not brought to them the inspiration of her deepest feelings,
they would have been irksome to her. But they had come to be the one
unshaken resting-place of her mind, the one narrow pathway on which the
light fell clear. If the gulf between herself and Tito which only
gathered a more perceptible wideness from her attempts to bridge it by
submission, brought a doubt whether, after all, the bond to which she
had laboured to be true might not itself be false--if she came away from
her confessor, Fra Salvestro, or from some contact with the disciples of
Savonarola amongst whom she worshipped, with a sickening sense that
these people were miserably narrow, and with an almost impetuous
reaction towards her old contempt for their superstition--she found
herself recovering a firm footing in her works of womanly sympathy.
Whatever else made her doubt, the help she gave to her fellow-citizens
made her sure that Fra Girolamo had been right to call her back.
According to his unforgotten words, her place had not been empty: it had
been filled with her love and her labour. Florence had had need of her,
and the more her own sorrow pressed upon her, the more gladness she felt
in the memories, stretching through the two long years, of hours and
moments in which she had lightened the burden of life to others. All
that ardour of her nature which could no longer spend itself in the
woman's tenderness for father and husband, had transformed itself into
an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general life. She had ceased to
think that her own lot could be happy--had ceased to think of happiness
at all: the one end of her life seemed to her to be the diminishing of
sorrow.

Her enthusiasm was cont