She goes back to reassume her cross:  sadly, weariedly forecasting, as only such a nature can do, all its shame and pain; and even still only dimly assured that her true path lies here.  The very nobleness which constrains her return makes that return the harder.  The unknown into which she had thought to flee had no possibility of pain or fear for her, compared to the certain pain and difficulty of that life from which all reality of love is gone:  where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in daily contact with baseness,—­may even have, through virtue of her relation to Tito, tacitly to concur in treason.  She goes back to what, constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she goes back to it knowing that such it must be.

Thenceforth goes on in her that process which, far beyond all reasonings, makes the mystery of sorrow intelligible to us,—­the “making perfect through suffering.”  It is not necessary we should trace the process step by step.  It is scarcely possible to do so, for its stages are too subtle to be so traced.  We see rather by result than in operation how her path of voluntary self-consecration—­of care and thought for all save self—­of patient, silent, solitary endurance of her crown of thorns, is brightening more and more toward the perfect day.  In the streets of the faction-torn, plague-stricken, famine-wasted city; by the side of the outraged Baldassarre; in the room of the child-mistress Tessa; most of all in that home whence all other brightness has departed,—­she moves and stands more and more before us the “visible Madonna.”

How sharply the sword has pierced her heart, how sorely the crown of thorns is pressing her fair young brow, we learn in part from her decisive interview with Tessa.  She, the high-born lady, spotless in purity, shrinking back from the very shadow of degradation, questions the unconscious instrument of one of her many wrongs with the one anxiety and hope that she may prove to be no true wife after all; that the bond which binds her to living falsehood and baseness may be broken, though its breaking stamp her with outward dishonour and blot.  Otherwise there is no obtrusion of her burning pain; no revolt of faith and trust, impeaching God of hardness and wrong toward her; no murmur in His ear, any more than in the ear of man.  Meek, patient, steadfast, she devotes herself to every duty and right that life has left to her; and the dark-garmented Piagnone moves about the busy scene a white-robed ministrant of mercy and love.  Ever and anon, indeed, the lonely anguish of her heart breaks forth, but in the form of expression it assumes she is emphatically herself.  In those frequent touching appeals to Tito, deepening in their sweet earnestness with every failure, we may read the intensity of her ever-present inward pain.  In them all the self-seeking of love has no place.  The effort is always primarily directed, not toward winning back his love and confidence for herself, but toward winning him back to truth and right and loyalty of soul.  Her pure high instinct knows that only so can love return between them—­can the shattered bond be again taken up.  She seeks to save him—­him who will not be saved, who has already vitally placed himself out of the pale of possible salvation.