uld have been the
vintage of my life, was cut off by the failure of my sight and my want
of a fitting coadjutor. For the sustained zeal and unconquerable
patience demanded from those who would tread the unbeaten paths of
knowledge are still less reconcilable with the wandering, vagrant
propensity of the feminine mind than with the feeble powers of the
feminine body."

"Father," said Romola, with a sudden flush and in an injured tone, "I
read anything you wish me to read; and I will look out any passages for
you, and make whatever notes you want."

Bardo shook his head, and smiled with a bitter sort of pity. "As well
try to be a pentathlos and perform all the five feats of the palaestra
with the limbs of a nymph. Have I forgotten thy fainting in the mere
search for the references I needed to explain a single passage of
Callimachus?"

"But, father, it was the weight of the books, and Maso can help me; it
was not want of attention and patience."

Bardo shook his head again. "It is not mere bodily organs that I want:
it is the sharp edge of a young mind to pierce the way for my somewhat
blunted faculties. For blindness acts like a dam, sending the streams
of thought backward along the already-travelled channels and hindering
the course onward. If my son had not forsaken me, deluded by debasing
fanatical dreams, worthy only of an energumen whose dwelling is among
tombs, I might have gone on and seen my path broadening to the end of my
life; for he was a youth of great promise. But it has closed in now,"
the old man continued, after a short pause; "it has closed in now;--all
but the narrow track he has left me to tread--alone in my blindness."

Romola started from her seat, and carried away the large volume to its
place again, stung too acutely by her father's last words to remain
motionless as well as silent; and when she turned away from the shelf
again, she remained standing at some distance from him, stretching her
arms downwards and clasping her fingers tightly as she looked with a sad
dreariness in her young face at the lifeless objects around her--the
parchment backs, the unchanging mutilated marble, the bits of obsolete
bronze and clay.

Bardo, though usually susceptible to Romola's movements and eager to
trace them, was now too entirely preoccupied by the pain of rankling
memories to notice her departure from his side.

"Yes," he went on, "with my son to aid me, I might have had my due share
in the tr