from you?"

"I have understood you too well, Tito."

"It is enough," he said, leaving the room.

Romola turned round with despair in her face and sank into her seat. "O
God, I have tried--I cannot help it. We shall always be divided."
Those words passed silently through her mind. "Unless," she said aloud,
as if some sudden vision had startled her into speech--"unless misery
should come and join us!"

Tito, too, had a new thought in his mind after he had closed the door
behind him. With the project of leaving Florence as soon as his life
there had become a high enough stepping-stone to a life elsewhere,
perhaps at Rome or Milan, there was now for the first, time associated a
desire to be free from Romola, and to leave her behind him. She had
ceased to belong to the desirable furniture of his life: there was no
possibility of an easy relation between them without genuineness on his
part. Genuineness implied confession of the past, and confession
involved a change of purpose. But Tito had as little bent that way as a
leopard has to lap milk when its teeth are grown. From all relations
that were not easy and agreeable, we know that Tito shrank: why should
he cling to them?

And Romola had made his relations difficult with others besides herself.
He had had a troublesome interview with Dolfo Spini, who had come back
in a rage after an ineffectual soaking with rain and long waiting in
ambush, and that scene between Romola and himself at Nello's door, once
reported in Spini's ear, might be a seed of something more unmanageable
than suspicion. But now, at least, he believed that he had mastered
Romola by a terror which appealed to the strongest forces of her nature.
He had alarmed her affection and her conscience by the shadowy image of
consequences; he had arrested her intellect by hanging before it the
idea of a hopeless complexity in affairs which defied any moral
judgment.

Yet Tito was not at ease. The world was not yet quite cushioned with
velvet, and, if it had been, he could not have abandoned himself to that
softness with thorough enjoyment; for before he went out again this
evening he put on his coat of chain-armour.

CHAPTER FORTY NINE.

THE PYRAMID OF VANITIES.

The wintry days passed for Romola as the white ships pass one who is
standing lonely on the shore--passing in silence and sameness, yet each
bearing a hidden burden of coming change. Tito's hint had mingled so
much dread with her