em to be nothing stronger than surprise.

"And you are certain that he is not going?" she insisted.

"I am certain that he is not going."

"That is enough," said Romola, and she turned up the steps, to take
refuge in the Duomo, till she could recover from her agitation.

Tito never had a feeling so near hatred as that with which his eyes
followed Romola retreating up the steps.

There were present not only genuine followers of the Frate, but Ser
Ceccone, the notary, who at that time, like Tito himself, was secretly
an agent of the Mediceans.

Ser Francesco di Ser Barone, more briefly known to infamy as Ser
Ceccone, was not learned, not handsome, not successful, and the reverse
of generous. He was a traitor without charm. It followed that he was
not fond of Tito Melema.

CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT.

COUNTER-CHECK.

It was late in the afternoon when Tito returned home. Romola, seated
opposite the cabinet in her narrow room, copying documents, was about to
desist from her work because the light was getting dim, when her husband
entered. He had come straight to this room to seek her, with a
thoroughly defined intention, and there was something new to Romola in
his manner and expression as he looked at her silently on entering, and,
without taking off his cap and mantle, leaned one elbow on the cabinet,
and stood directly in front of her.

Romola, fully assured during the day of the Frate's safety, was feeling
the reaction of some penitence for the access of distrust and
indignation which had impelled her to address her husband publicly on a
matter that she knew he wished to be private. She told herself that she
had probably been wrong. The scheming duplicity which she had heard
even her godfather allude to as inseparable from party tactics might be
sufficient to account for the connection with Spini, without the
supposition that Tito had ever meant to further the plot. She wanted to
atone for her impetuosity by confessing that she had been too hasty, and
for some hours her mind had been dwelling on the possibility that this
confession of hers might lead to other frank words breaking the two
years' silence of their hearts. The silence had been so complete, that
Tito was ignorant of her having fled from him and come back again; they
had never approached an avowal of that past which, both in its young
love and in the shock that shattered the love, lay locked away from them
like a banquet-room where death had o