the death of his elder brother Niccolò, had promised that she should be guarded, and now stood by her side.

Tito, too, was in the palace; but Romola had not seen him. Since the evening of the seventeenth they had avoided each other, and Tito only knew by inference from the report of the Frate’s neutrality that her pleading had failed. He was now surrounded with official and other personages, both Florentine and foreign, who had been awaiting the issue of the long-protracted council, maintaining, except when he was directly addressed, the subdued air and grave silence of a man whom actual events are placing in a painful state of strife between public and private feeling. When an allusion was made to his wife in relation to those events, he implied that, owing to the violent excitement of her mind, the mere fact of his continuing to hold office under a government concerned in her godfather’s condemnation, roused in her a diseased hostility towards him; so that for her sake he felt it best not to approach her.

“Ah, the old Bardi blood!” said Cennini, with a shrug. “I shall not be surprised if this business shakes her loose from the Frate, as well as some others I could name.”

“It is excusable in a woman, who is doubtless beautiful, since she is the wife of Messer Tito,” said a young French envoy, smiling and bowing to Tito, “to think that her affections must overrule the good of the State, and that nobody is to be beheaded who is anybody’s cousin; but such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population. It seems to me your Florentine polity is much weakened by it.”

“That is true,” said Niccolò Macchiavelli; “but where personal ties are strong, the hostilities they raise must be taken due account of. Many of these half-way severities are mere hot-headed blundering. The only safe blows to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are too heavy to be avenged.”

“Niccolò,” said Cennini, “there is a clever wickedness in thy talk sometimes that makes me mistrust thy pleasant young face as if it were a mask of Satan.”

“Not at all, my good Domenico,” said Macchiavelli, smiling, and laying his hand on the elder’s shoulder. “Satan was a blunderer, an introducer of novita, who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattered.”

“Well, well,” said Cennini, “I say not thy doctrine