of a boisterous conjurer, took her under his protection.

Thereafter, he met her again at intervals, finding her naive love and
humble adoration and obedience very pleasant; and, meeting her once at a
peasant's fair, he jestingly yielded to the burlesque solicitations of a
mountebank in a white mitre, paid a small fee, and went through an
absurd ceremony of mock-marriage with her.

Tessa herself believed the marriage to be real enough, and he would not
mar her delight by undeceiving her. Later, since she was wretched at
home with her scolding mother and a brutal step-father, and there were
dangers in allowing her to go on waylaying him in streets when too long
a period elapsed between his visits to her, he quietly took her away and
established her in a small house on the outskirts of the city, with the
deaf, discreet old Monna Lisa as her servant and companion.

Neither this nor the darker secret of his treachery to his adoptive
father cast any cloud over his habitual cheerfulness. His love for
Romola was a higher and deeper passion than anything he felt for the
child-like, submissive little Tessa, and when she told him frankly of
her brother's warning vision, he set himself to convince her it was the
mere nightmare of a diseased imagination, and the perfect love and trust
she had for him made the task easy.

For a while after their marriage she was ideally happy; she was not even
separated from her father, for Tito came to live with them, and was to
Bardo, in his scholastic labours, all that he had wished his own son to
be. Then came the first cloud.

On November 17, 1494, more than eighteen months after the marriage of