becomes beyond her bearing, and again she attempts to lay it down by
fleeing. There is no Savonarola now to meet and turn her back.
Savonarola has lost the power, has forfeited the right, to do so. The
pupil has outgrown the teacher; her self-renunciation has become simpler,
purer, deeper, more entire than his. The last words exchanged between
these two bring before us the change that has come over the spiritual
relations between them. "The cause of my party," says Savonarola, "_is_
the cause of God's kingdom." "I do not believe it," is the reply of
Romola's "passionate repugnance." "God's kingdom is something wider,
else let me stand without it with the beings that I love." These words
tell us the secret of Savonarola's gathering weakness and of Romola's
strength. Self, under the subtle form of identifying truth and right
with his own party--with his own personal judgment of the cause and the
course of right--has so far led _him_ astray from the straight onward
path. Right, in its clear, calm, direct simplicity, has become to her
supreme above what is commonly called salvation itself.

It is another agency than Savonarola's now that brings her back once more
to take up the full burden of her cross. She goes forth not knowing or
heeding whither she goes, "drifting away" unconscious before wind and
wave. These bear her into the midst of terror, suffering, and death; and
there, in self-devotedness to others, in patient ministrations of love
amid poverty, ignorance, and superstition, the noble spirit rights itself
once more, the weary fainting heart regains its quiet steadfastness. She
knows once more that no amount of wrong-doing can dissolve the bond
uniting her to Tito; that no degree of pain may lawfully drive her forth
from that sphere of doing and suffering which is _hers_. She returns,
not in joy or hope, but in that which is deeper than all joy and hope--in
love; the one thought revealed to us being that it may be her blessedness
to stand by him whose baseness drove her away when suffering and loss