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 alluring 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 sufiicient to accoum 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 once broken the feast.

She looked up at him with that submission in her glance which belonged to her state of self-reproof; but the subtle change in his face and manner arrested her speech. For a few moments they remained silent, looking at each other.

Tito himself felt that a crisis was come in his married life. The husband’s determination to mastery, which lay deep below all blandness and beseechingness, had risen permanently to the surface now, and seemed to alter his face, as a face is altered by a hidden muscular tension with which a man is secretly throttling or stamping out the life from something feeble, yet dangerous.

‘Romola,’ he began, in the cool liquid tone that made her shiver, ‘it is time that we should understand each other.’ He paused.

‘That is what I most desire, Tito,’ she said, faintly. Her sweet pale face, with all its anger gone and nothing but the timidity of self-doubt in it, seemed to give a marked predominance to her husband’s dark strength.

‘You took a step this morning,’ Tito went on, ‘which you must now yourself perceive to have been useless — which exposed you to remark and may involve me in serious practical difficulties.’

‘I acknowledge that I was too hasty; I am sorry for any injustice I may have done you.’ Romola spoke these words in a fuller and firmer tone; Tito, she hoped, would look less hard when she expressed her regret, and then she could say other things.

‘I wish you once for all to understand,’ he said, without any change of voice, ‘that such collisions are incompatible with our position as husband and wife. I wish you to reflect on the mode in which you were led to that step, that the process may not be repeated.’

‘That depends chiefly on you, Tito,’ said Romola, taking fire slightly. It was not at all what she had thought of saying, but we see a very little way before us in mutual speech.

‘You would say, I suppose,’ answered Tito, ‘that nothing is to occur in future which can excite your unreasonable suspicions. You were frank enough to say last night that you have no belief in me. I am not surprised at any exaggerated conclusion you may draw from slight premises, but I wish to point out to you what is likely to be the fruit of your making such exaggerated conclusions a ground for interfering in affairs of which you are ignorant. Your attention is thoroughly awake to what I am saying?’

He paused for a reply.

‘Yes,’ said Romola, flushing in 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 hus arm. But Romola’s touch and glance no longer stirred any fibre of tenderness in her husband. The good-humoured, tolerant Tito, incapable of hatred, incapable almost of impatience, disposed always to be gentle towards the rest of the world, felt himself becoming strangely hard towards this wife whose presence had once been the strongest influence he had known. With all his softness of disposit............