rd the perfect day. In the streets of the
faction-torn, plague-stricken, famine-wasted city; by the side of the
outraged Baldassarre; in the room of the child-mistress Tessa; most of
all in that home whence all other brightness has departed,--she moves and
stands more and more before us the "visible Madonna."

How sharply the sword has pierced her heart, how sorely the crown of
thorns is pressing her fair young brow, we learn in part from her
decisive interview with Tessa. She, the high-born lady, spotless in
purity, shrinking back from the very shadow of degradation, questions the
unconscious instrument of one of her many wrongs with the one anxiety and
hope that she may prove to be no true wife after all; that the bond which
binds her to living falsehood and baseness may be broken, though its
breaking stamp her with outward dishonour and blot. Otherwise there is
no obtrusion of her burning pain; no revolt of faith and trust,
impeaching God of hardness and wrong toward her; no murmur in His ear,
any more than in the ear of man. Meek, patient, steadfast, she devotes
herself to every duty and right that life has left to her; and the dark-
garmented Piagnone moves about the busy scene a white-robed ministrant of
mercy and love. Ever and anon, indeed, the lonely anguish of her heart
breaks forth, but in the form of expression it assumes she is
emphatically herself. In those frequent touching appeals to Tito,
deepening in their sweet earnestness with every failure, we may read the
intensity of her ever-present inward pain. In them all the self-seeking
of love has no place. The effort is always primarily directed, not
toward winning back his love and confidence for herself, but toward
winning him back to truth and right and loyalty of soul. Her pure high
instinct knows that only so can love return between them--can the
shattered bond be again taken up. She seeks to save _him_--him who will
not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale of
possible salvation.

One of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all
records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her
relations to Tessa. It would seem as if in that large heart jealousy,
the reaching self-love of love, could find no place. Her discovery of
the relation in which Tessa stands to Tito awakens first that saddest of
all sad hopes in one like Romola, that through the contadina she may be
released from the ma