herself to every duty and right that life has left to her; and the dark-
garmented Piagnone moves about the busy scene a white-robed ministrant of
mercy and love. Ever and anon, indeed, the lonely anguish of her heart
breaks forth, but in the form of expression it assumes she is
emphatically herself. In those frequent touching appeals to Tito,
deepening in their sweet earnestness with every failure, we may read the
intensity of her ever-present inward pain. In them all the self-seeking
of love has no place. The effort is always primarily directed, not
toward winning back his love and confidence for herself, but toward
winning him back to truth and right and loyalty of soul. Her pure high
instinct knows that only so can love return between them--can the
shattered bond be again taken up. She seeks to save _him_--him who will
not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale of
possible salvation.

One of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all
records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her
relations to Tessa. It would seem as if in that large heart jealousy,
the reaching self-love of love, could find no place. Her discovery of
the relation in which Tessa stands to Tito awakens first that saddest of
all sad hopes in one like Romola, that through the contadina she may be
released from the marriage-bond that so galls and darkens her life. When
that hope is gone, no thought of Tessa as a successful rival presents
itself. She thinks of her only as another victim of Tito's
wrong-doing--as a weak, simple, helpless child, innocent of all conscious
fault, to be shielded and cared for in the hour of need.

At last, after the foulest of Tito's treasons, which purchases safety and
advancement for himself by the betrayal and death of her noble old
godfather, her last living link to the past, the burden of her life