reality of love is gone: where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in
daily contact with baseness,--may even have, through virtue of her
relation to Tito, tacitly to concur in treason. She goes back to what,
constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she
goes back to it knowing that such it must be.

Thenceforth goes on in her that process which, far beyond all reasonings,
makes the mystery of sorrow intelligible to us,--the "making perfect
through suffering." It is not necessary we should trace the process step
by step. It is scarcely possible to do so, for its stages are too subtle
to be so traced. We see rather by result than in operation how her path
of voluntary self-consecration--of care and thought for all save self--of
patient, silent, solitary endurance of her crown of thorns, is
brightening more and more toward the perfect day. In the streets of the
faction-torn, plague-stricken, famine-wasted city; by the side of the
outraged Baldassarre; in the room of the child-mistress Tessa; most of
all in that home whence all other brightness has departed,--she moves and
stands more and more before us the "visible Madonna."

How sharply the sword has pierced her heart, how sorely the crown of
thorns is pressing her fair young brow, we learn in part from her
decisive interview with Tessa. She, the high-born lady, spotless in
purity, shrinking back from the very shadow of degradation, questions the
unconscious instrument of one of her many wrongs with the one anxiety and
hope that she may prove to be no true wife after all; that the bond which
binds her to living falsehood and baseness may be broken, though its
breaking stamp her with outward dishonour and blot. Otherwise there is
no obtrusion of her burning pain; no revolt of faith and trust,
impeaching God of hardness and wrong toward her; no murmur in His ear,
any more than in the ear of man. Meek, patient, steadfast, she devotes