that made her heart beat faster; for to one who is anxiously in search of a certain object the faintest suggestions have a peculiar significance. And when the curl was held towards her, it seemed for an instant like a mocking phantasm of the lock she herself had cut to wind with one of her own five years ago. But she preserved her outward calmness, bent not only on knowing the truth, but also on coming to that knowledge in a way that would not pain this poor, trusting, ignorant thing, with the child’s mind in the woman’s body. “Foolish and helpless:” yes; so far she corresponded to Baldassarre’s account.
“It is a beautiful curl,” she said, resisting the impulse to withdraw her hand. “Lillo’s curls will be like it, perhaps, for his cheek, too, is dark. And you never know where your husband goes to when he leaves you?”
“No,” said Tessa, putting back her treasures out of the children’s way. “But I know Messer San Michele takes care of him, for he gave him a beautiful coat, all made of little chains; and if he puts that on, nobody can kill him. And perhaps, if—”
Tessa hesitated a little, under a recurrence of that original dreamy wonder about Romola which had been expelled by chatting contact—“if you were a saint, you would take care of him, too, because you have taken care of me and Lillo.”
An agitated flush came over Romola’s face in the first moment of certainty, but she had bent her cheek against Lillo’s head. The feeling that leaped out in that flush was something like exultation at the thought that the wife’s burden might be about to slip from her overladen shoulders; that this little ignorant creature might prove to be Tito’s lawful wife. A strange exultation for a proud and highborn woman to have been brought to! But it seemed to Romola as if that were the only issue that would make duty anything else for her than an insoluble problem. Yet she was not deaf to Tessa’s last appealing words; she raised her head, and said, in her clearest tones—