irrepressible resentment at this cold
tone of superiority.

"Well, then, it may possibly not be very long before some other chance
words or incidents set your imagination at work devising crimes for me,
and you may perhaps rush to the Palazzo Vecchio to alarm the Signoria
and set the city in an uproar. Shall I tell you what may be the result?
Not simply the disgrace of your husband, to which you look forward with
so much courage, but the arrest and ruin of many among the chief men in
Florence, including Messer Bernardo del Nero."

Tito had meditated a decisive move, and he had made it. The flush died
out of Romola's face, and her very lips were pale--an unusual effect
with her, for she was little subject to fear. Tito perceived his
success.

"You would perhaps flatter yourself," he went on, "that you were
performing a heroic deed of deliverance; you might as well try to turn
locks with fine words as apply such notions to the politics of Florence.
The question now is, not whether you can have any belief in me, but
whether, now you have been warned, you will dare to rush, like a blind
man with a torch in his hand, amongst intricate affairs of which you
know nothing."

Romola felt as if her mind were held in a vice by Tito's: the
possibilities he had indicated were rising before her with terrible
clearness.

"I am too rash," she said. "I will try not to be rash."

"Remember," said Tito, with unsparing insistance, "that your act of
distrust towards me this morning might, for aught you knew, have had
more fatal effects than that sacrifice of your husband which you have
learned to contemplate without flinching."

"Tito, it is not so," Romola burst forth in a pleading tone, rising and
going nearer to him, with a desperate resolution to speak out. "It is
false that I would willingly sacrifice you. It has been the greatest
effort of my life to cling to you. I went away in my anger two years
ago, and I came back again because I was more bound to you than to
anything else on earth. But it is useless. You shut me out from your
mind. You affect to think of me as a being too unreasonable to share in
the knowledge of your affairs. You will be open with me about nothing."

She looked like his good angel pleading with him, as she bent her face
towards him with dilated eyes, and laid her hand upon his arm. But
Romola's touch and glance no longer stirred any fibre of tenderness in
her husband. The good-humoured, tol