On San Miniato
“I would speak with you,” said Baldassarre, as Romola looked at him in silent expectation. It was plain that he had followed her, and had been waiting for her. She was going at last to know the secret about him.
“Yes,” she said, with the same sort of submission that she might have shown under an imposed penance. “But you wish to go where no one can hear us?”
“Where he will not come upon us,” said Baldassarre, turning and glancing behind him timidly. “Out—in the air—away from the streets.”
“I sometimes go to San Miniato at this hour,” said Romola. “If you like, I will go now, and you can follow me. It is far, but we can be solitary there.”
He nodded assent, and Romola set out. To some women it might have seemed an alarming risk to go to a comparatively solitary spot with a man who had some of the outward signs of that madness which Tito attributed to him. But Romola was not given to personal fears, and she was glad of the distance that interposed some delay before another blow fell on her. The afternoon was far advanced, and the sun was already low in the west, when she paused on some rough ground in the shadow of the cypress-trunks, and looked round for Baldassarre. He was not far off, but when he reached her, he was glad to sink down on an edge of stony earth. His thickset frame had no longer the sturdy vigour which belonged to it when he first appeared with the rope round him in the Duomo; and under the transient tremor caused by the exertion of walking up the hill, his eyes seemed to have a more helpless vagueness.