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 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.