human difficulties, and that rocky
solitude was too far off. She rose from her knees that she might hasten
to her sick people in the courtyard, and by some immediate beneficent
action, revive that sense of worth in life which at this moment was
unfed by any wider faith. But when she turned round, she found herself
face to face with a man who was standing only two yards off her. The
man was Baldassarre.

CHAPTER FIFTY THREE.

ON SAN MINIATO.

"I would speak with you," said Baldassarre, as Romola looked at him in
silent expectation. It was plain that he had followed her, and had been
waiting for her. She was going at last to know the secret about him.

"Yes," she said, with the same sort of submission that she might have
shown under an imposed penance. "But you wish to go where no one can
hear us?"

"Where _he_ will not come upon us," said Baldassarre, turning and
glancing behind him timidly. "Out--in the air--away from the streets."

"I sometimes go to San Miniato at this hour," said Romola. "If you
like, I will go now, and you can follow me. It is far, but we can be
solitary there."

He nodded assent, and Romola set out. To some women it might have
seemed an alarming risk to go to a comparatively solitary spot with a
man who had some of the outward signs of that madness which Tito
attributed to him. But Romola was not given to personal fears, and she
was glad of the distance that interposed some delay before another blow
fell on her. The afternoon was far advanced, and the sun was already
low in the west, when she paused on some rough ground in the shadow of
the cypress-trunks, and looked round for Baldassarre. He was not far
off, but when he reached her, he was glad to sink down on an edge of
stony earth. His thickset frame had no longer the sturdy vigour which
belonged to it when he first appeared with the rope round him in the
Duomo; and under the transient tremor caused by the exertion of walking
up the hill, his eyes seemed to have a more helpless vagueness.

"The hill is steep," said Romola, with compassionate gentleness, seating
herself by him. "And I fear you have been weakened by want?"

He turned his head and fixed his eyes on her in silence, unable, now the
moment of speech was come, to seize the words that would convey the
thought he wanted to utter: and she remained as motionless as she could,
lest he should suppose her impatient. He looked like nothing higher
than a common-b