Strange, bewildering transition from those pale images of sorrow and death to this bright youthfulness, as of a sun-god who knew nothing of night!
What thought could reconcile that worn anguish in her brother’s face—that straining after something invisible—with this satisfied strength and beauty, and make it intelligible that they belonged to the same world?
Or was there never any reconciling of them, but only a blind worship of clashing deities, first in mad joy and then in wailing?
Romola for the first time felt this questioning need like a sudden uneasy dizziness and want of something to grasp; it was an experience hardly longer than a sigh, for the eager theorising of ages is compressed, as in a seed, in the momentary want of a single mind.
But there was no answer to meet the need, and it vanished before the returning rush of young sympathy with the glad loving beauty that beamed upon her in new radiance, like the dawn after we have looked away from it to the grey west.
“Your mind lingers apart from our love, my Romola,” Tito said, with a soft reproachful murmur. “It seems a forgotten thing to you.”
She looked at the beseeching eyes in silence, till the sadness all melted out of her own.
“My joy!” she said, in her full clear voice.