suggested itself. She learned that Tito had provided horses and mules to await him in San Gallo; he was therefore going to leave Florence by the gate of San Gallo, and she determined, though without much confidence in the issue, to try and ascertain from the gatekeepers if they had observed anyone corresponding to the description of Tessa with her children, to have passed the gates before the morning of the ninth of April. Walking along the Via San Gallo, and looking watchfully about her through her long widow’s veil, lest she should miss any object that might aid her, she descried Bratti chaffering with a customer. That roaming man, she thought, might aid her: she would not mind talking of Tessa to him . But as she put aside her veil and crossed the street towards him, she saw something hanging from the corner of his basket which made her heart leap with a much stronger hope.
“Bratti, my friend,” she said abruptly, “where did you get that necklace?”
“Your servant, madonna,” said Bratti, looking round at her very deliberately, his mind not being subject to surprise. “It’s a necklace worth money, but I shall get little by it, for my heart’s too tender for a trader’s; I have promised to keep it in pledge.”
“Pray tell me where you got it;—from a little woman named Tessa, is it not true?”
“Ah! if you know her,” said Bratti, “and would redeem it of me at a small profit, and give it her again, you’d be doing a charity, for she cried at parting with it—you’d have thought she was running into a brook. It’s a small profit I’ll charge you. You shall have it for a florin, for I don’t like to be hard-hearted.”
“Where is she?” said Romola, giving him the money, and unclasping the necklace from the basket in joyful agitation.
“Outside the gate there, at the other end of the Borgo, at old Sibilla Manetti’s: anybody will tell you which is the house.”