rily the wine-breathing Compagnaccio might become savage, being
more ready at resentment than at the divination of motives. He adopted
a third course, which proved that Romola retained one sort of power over
him--the power of dread.

He pressed her hand, as if intending a hint to her, and said in a
good-humoured tone of comradeship--

"Yes, my Dolfo, you may prepare in all security. But take no trumpets
with you."

"Don't be afraid," said Spini, a little piqued. "No need to play Ser
Saccente with me. I know where the devil keeps his tail as well as you
do. What! he swallowed the bait whole? The prophetic nose didn't scent
the hook at all?" he went on, lowering his tone a little, with a
blundering sense of secrecy.

"The brute will not be satisfied till he has emptied the bag," thought
Tito: but aloud he said,--"Swallowed all as easily as you swallow a cup
of Trebbiano. Ha! I see torches: there must be a dead body coming.
The pestilence has been spreading, I hear."

"Santiddio! I hate the sight of those biers. Good-night," said Spini,
hastily moving off.

The torches were really coming, but they preceded a church dignitary who
was returning homeward; the suggestion of the dead body and the
pestilence was Tito's device for getting rid of Spini without telling
him to go. The moment he had moved away, Tito turned to Romola, and
said, quietly--

"Do not be alarmed by anything that _bestia_ has said, my Romola. We
will go on now: I think the rain has not increased."

She was quivering with indignant resolution; it was of no use for Tito
to speak in that unconcerned way. She distrusted every word he could
utter.

"I will not go on," she said. "I will not move nearer home until I have
some security against this treachery being perpetrated."

"Wait, at least, until these torches have passed," said Tito, with
perfect self-command, but with a new rising of dislike to a wife who
this time, he foresaw, might have the power of thwarting him in spite of
the husband's predominance.

The torches passed, with the Vicario dell' Arcivescovo, and due
reverence was done by Tito, but Romola saw nothing outward. If for the
defeat of this treachery, in which she believed with all the force of
long presentiment, it had been necessary at that moment for her to
spring on her husband and hurl herself with him down a precipice, she
felt as if she could have done it. Union with this man! At that moment
the self-quellin