e had
chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his
wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth
desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he
should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of
his conduct should not remain for ever concealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes,
whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The
contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in
the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our
self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the
purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by
it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers the
noble attitude of simplicity.

Besides, in this first distinct colloquy with himself the ideas which
had previously been scattered and interrupted had now concentrated
themselves; the little rills of selfishness had united and made a
channel, so that they could never again meet with the same resistance.
Hitherto Tito had left in vague indecision the question whether, with
the means in his power, he would not return, and ascertain his father's
fate; he had now made a definite excuse to himself for not taking that
course; he had avowed to himself a choice which he would have been
ashamed to avow to others, and which would have made him ashamed in the
resurgent presence of his father. But the inward shame, the reflex of
that outward law which the great heart of mankind makes for every
individual man, a reflex which will exist even in the absence of the
sympathetic impulses that need no law, but rush to the deed of fidelity
and pity as inevitably as the brute mother shields her young from the
attack of the hereditary enemy--that inward shame was showing its
blushes in Tito's determined assertion to himself that his father was
dead, or that at least search was hopeless.

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Note 1. A sum given by the bridegroom to the bride the day after the
marriage. _Morgengabe_.

CHAPTER TEN.

UNDER THE PLANE-TREE.

On the day of San Giovanni it was already three weeks ago that Tito had
handed his florins to Cennini, and we have seen that as he set out
towards the Via de' Bardi he showed all the outward signs of a mind at
ease. How should it be oth