f a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight
of crows.

But the passing wish about pretty Tessa was almost immediately eclipsed
by the recurrent recollection of that friar whose face had some
irrecoverable association for him. Why should a sickly fanatic, worn
with fasting, have looked at _him_ in particular, and where in all his
travels could he remember encountering that face before? Folly! such
vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs, with tickling
importunity--best to sweep them away at a dash: and Tito had pleasanter
occupation for his thoughts. By the time he was turning out of the
Corso degli Adimari into a side-street he was caring only that the sun
was high, and that the procession had kept him longer than he had
intended from his visit to that room in the Via de' Bardi, where his
coming, he knew, was anxiously awaited. He felt the scene of his
entrance beforehand: the joy beaming diffusedly in the blind face like
the light in a semi-transparent lamp; the transient pink flush on
Romola's face and neck, which subtracted nothing from her majesty, but
only gave it the exquisite charm of womanly sensitiveness, heightened
still more by what seemed the paradoxical boy-like frankness of her look
and smile. They were the best comrades in the world during the hours
they passed together round the blind man's chair: she was constantly
appealing to Tito, and he was informing her, yet he felt himself
strangely in subjection to Romola with that simplicity of hers: he felt
for the first time, without defining it to himself, that loving awe in
the presence of noble womanhood, which is perhaps something like the
worship paid of old to a great nature-goddess, who was not all-knowing,
but whose life and power were something deeper and more primordial than
knowledge. They had never been alone together, and he could frame to
himself no probable image of love-scenes between them: he could only
fancy and wish wildly--what he knew was impossible--that Romola would
some day tell him that she loved him. One day in Greece, as he was
leaning over a wall in the sunshine, a little black-eyed peasant girl,
who had rested her water-pot on the wall, crept gradually nearer and
nearer to him, and at last shyly asked him to kiss her, putting up her
round olive cheek very innocently. Tito was used to love that came in
this unsought fashion. But Romola's love would never come in that way:
would it ever come at all?--and yet it