nd the instinctive
shrinking from a return to her husband brought doubts. She turned away
her eyes from Fra Girolamo, and stood for a minute or two with her hands
hanging clasped before her, like a statue. At last she spoke, as if the
words were being wrung from her, still looking on the ground.

"My husband... he is not... my love is gone!"

"My daughter, there is the bond of a higher love. Marriage is not
carnal only, made for selfish delight. See what that thought leads you
to! It leads you to wander away in a false garb from all the
obligations of your place and name. That would not have been, if you
had learned that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God can
release you. My daughter, your life is not as a grain of sand, to be
blown by the winds; it is a thing of flesh and blood, that dies if it be
sundered. Your husband is not a malefactor?"

Romola started. "Heaven forbid! No; I accuse him of nothing."

"I did not suppose he was a malefactor. I meant, that if he were a
malefactor, your place would be in the prison beside him. My daughter,
if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife. You
may say, `I will forsake my husband,' but you cannot cease to be a
wife."

"Yet if--oh, how could I bear--" Romola had involuntarily begun to say
something which she sought to banish from her mind again.

"Make your marriage-sorrows an offering too, my daughter: an offering to
the great work by which sin and sorrow are being made to cease. The end
is sure, and is already beginning. Here in Florence it is beginning,
and the eyes of faith behold it. And it may be our blessedness to die
for it: to die daily by the crucifixion of our selfish will--to die at
last by laying our bodies on the altar. My daughter, you are a child of
Florence; fulfil the duties of that great inheritance. Live for
Florence--for your own people, whom God is preparing to bless the earth.
Bear the anguish and the smart. The iron is sharp--I know, I know--it
rends the tender flesh. The draught is bitterness on the lips. But
there is rapture in the cup--there is the vision which makes all life
below it dross for ever. Come, my daughter, come back to your place!"

While Savonarola spoke with growing intensity, his arms tightly folded
before him still, as they had been from the first, but his face alight
as from an inward flame, Romola felt herself surrounded and possessed by
the glow of his passionate fait