it was wonderful; you came and went away again so fast. And Naldo said, perhaps you were a saint, and that made me tremble a little, though the saints are very good, I know; and you were good to me, and now you have taken care of Lillo. Perhaps you will always come and take care of me. That was how Naldo did a long while ago; he came and took care of me when I was frightened, one San Giovanni. I couldn’t think where he came from—he was so beautiful and good. And so are you,” ended Tessa, looking up at Romola with devout admiration.
“Naldo is your husband. His eyes are like Lillo’s,” said Romola, looking at the boy’s darkly-pencilled eyebrows, unusual at his age. She did not speak interrogatively, but with a quiet certainty of inference which was necessarily mysterious to Tessa.
“Ah! you know him!” she said, pausing a little in wonder. “Perhaps you know Nofri and Peretola, and our house on the hill, and everything. Yes, like Lillo’s; but not his hair. His hair is dark and long—” she went on, getting rather excited. “Ah! if you know it, ecco !”
She had put her hand to a thin red silk cord that hung round her neck, and drew from her bosom the tiny old parchment Breve , the horn of red coral, and a long dark curl carefully tied at one end and suspended with those mystic treasures. She held them towards Romola, away from Ninna’s snatching hand.
“It is a fresh one. I cut it lately. See how bright it is!” she said, laying it against the white background of Romola’s fingers. “They get dim, and then he lets me cut another when his hair is grown; and I put it with the Breve , because sometimes he is away a long while, and then I think it helps to take care of me.”
A slight shiver passed through Romola as the curl was laid across her fingers. At Tessa’s first mention of her husband as having come mysteriously she knew not whence, a possibility had risen before Romola