One of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her relations to Tessa.  It would seem as if in that large heart jealousy, the reaching self-love of love, could find no place.  Her discovery of the relation in which Tessa stands to Tito awakens first that saddest of all sad hopes in one like Romola, that through the contadina she may be released from the marriage-bond that so galls and darkens her life.  When that hope is gone, no thought of Tessa as a successful rival presents itself.  She thinks of her only as another victim of Tito’s wrong-doing—­as a weak, simple, helpless child, innocent of all conscious fault, to be shielded and cared for in the hour of need.

At last, after the foulest of Tito’s treasons, which purchases safety and advancement for himself by the betrayal and death of her noble old godfather, her last living link to the past, the burden of her life becomes beyond her bearing, and again she attempts to lay it down by fleeing.  There is no Savonarola now to meet and turn her back.  Savonarola has lost the power, has forfeited the right, to do so.  The pupil has outgrown the teacher; her self-renunciation has become simpler, purer, deeper, more entire than his.  The last words exchanged between these two bring before us the change that has come over the spiritual relations between them.  “The cause of my party,” says Savonarola, “is the cause of God’s kingdom.”  “I do not believe it,” is the reply of Romola’s “passionate repugnance.”  “God’s kingdom is something wider, else let me stand without it with the beings that I love.”  These words tell us the secret of Savonarola’s gathering weakness and of Romola’s strength.  Self, under the subtle form of identifying truth and right with his own party—­with his own personal judgment of the cause and the course of right—­has so far led him astray from the straight onward path.  Right, in its clear, calm, direct simplicity, has become to her supreme above what is commonly called salvation itself.

It is another agency than Savonarola’s now that brings her back once more to take up the full burden of her cross.  She goes forth not knowing or heeding whither she goes, “drifting away” unconscious before wind and wave.  These bear her into the midst of terror, suffering, and death; and there, in self-devotedness to others, in patient ministrations of love amid poverty, ignorance, and superstition, the noble spirit rights itself once more, the weary fainting heart regains its quiet steadfastness.  She knows once more that no amount of wrong-doing can dissolve the bond uniting her to Tito; that no degree of pain may lawfully drive her forth from that sphere of doing and suffering which is hers.  She returns, not in joy or hope, but in that which is deeper than all joy and hope—­in love; the one thought revealed to us being that it may be her blessedness to stand by him whose baseness drove