even if she had been
in a less submissive mood. She put up one hand deprecatingly to arrest
Romola's remonstrance, and with the other reached out a grosso, worth
many white quattrini, saying, in an entreating tone--

"Take it, good man, and begone."

"You're in the right, madonna," said Bratti, taking the coin quickly,
and thrusting the cross into her hand; "I'll not offer you change, for I
might as well rob you of a mass. What! we must all be scorched a
little, but you'll come off the easier; better fall from the window than
the roof. A good Easter and a good year to you!"

"Well, Romola," cried Monna Brigida, pathetically, as Bratti left them,
"if I'm to be a Piagnone it's no matter how I look!"

"Dear cousin," said Romola, smiling at her affectionately, "you don't
know how much better you look than you ever did before. I see now how
good-natured your face is, like yourself. That red and finery seemed to
thrust themselves forward and hide expression. Ask our Piero or any
other painter if he would not rather paint your portrait now than
before. I think all lines of the human face have something either
touching or grand, unless they seem to come from low passions. How fine
old men are, like my godfather! Why should not old women look grand and
simple?"

"Yes, when one gets to be sixty, my Romola," said Brigida, relapsing a
little; "but I'm only fifty-five, and Monna Berta, and everybody--but
it's no use: I will be good, like you. Your mother, if she'd been
alive, would have been as old as I am; we were cousins together. One
_must_ either die or get old. But it doesn't matter about being old, if
one's a Piagnone."

CHAPTER FIFTY TWO.

A PROPHETESS.

The incidents of that Carnival day seemed to Romola to carry no other
personal consequences to her than the new care of supporting poor cousin
Brigida in her fluctuating resignation to age and grey hairs; but they
introduced a Lenten time in which she was kept at a high pitch of mental
excitement and active effort.

Bernardo del Nero had been elected Gonfaloniere. By great exertions the
Medicean party had so far triumphed, and that triumph had deepened
Romola's presentiment of some secretly-prepared scheme likely to ripen
either into success or betrayal during these two months of her
godfather's authority. Every morning the dim daybreak as it peered into
her room seemed to be that haunting fear coming back to her. Every
morning the fear went wi