avowal of that past which, both in its young love and in the shock that shattered the love, lay locked away from them like a banquet-room where death had once broken the feast.
She looked up at him with that submission in her glance which belonged to her state of self-reproof; but the subtle change in his face and manner arrested her speech. For a few moments they remained silent, looking at each other.
Tito himself felt that a crisis was come in his married life. The husband’s determination to mastery, which lay deep below all blandness and beseechingness, had risen permanently to the surface now, and seemed to alter his face, as a face is altered by a hidden muscular tension with which a man is secretly throttling or stamping out the life from something feeble, yet dangerous.
“Romola,” he began, in the cool liquid tone that made her shiver, “it is time that we should understand each other.”
He paused.
“That is what I most desire, Tito,” she said, faintly. Her sweet pale face; with all its anger gone and nothing but the timidity of self-doubt in it, seemed to give a marked predominance to her husband’s dark strength.
“You took a step this morning,” Tito went on, “which you must now yourself perceive to have been useless—which exposed you to remark and may involve me in serious practical difficulties.”
“I acknowledge that I was too hasty; I am sorry for any injustice I may have done you.”
Romola spoke these words in a fuller and firmer tone; Tito, she hoped, would look less hard when she had expressed her regret, and then she could say other things.