CHAPTER NINE.  A MAN'S RANSOM.

Tito was soon down among the crowd, and, notwithstanding his indifferent reply to Nello's question about his chance acquaintance, he was not without a passing wish, as he made his way round the piazza to the Corso degli Adimari, that he might encounter the pair of blue eyes which had looked up towards him from under the square bit of white linen drapery that formed the ordinary hood of the contadina at festa time.  He was perfectly well aware that that face was Tessa's; but he had not chosen to say so.  What had Nello to do with the matter?  Tito had an innate love of reticence--let us say a talent for it--which acted as other impulses do, without any conscious motive, and, like all people to whom concealment is easy, he would now and then conceal something which had as little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of crows.

But the passing wish about pretty Tessa was almost immediately eclipsed by the recurrent recollection of that friar whose face had some irrecoverable association for him.  Why should a sickly fanatic, worn with fasting, have looked at _him_ in particular, and where in all his travels could he remember encountering that face before?  Folly! such vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs, with tickling importunity--best to sweep them away at a dash: and Tito had pleasanter occupation for his thoughts.  By the time he was turning out of the Corso degli Adimari into a side-street he was caring only that the sun was high, and that the procession had kept him longer than he had intended from his visit to that room in the Via de' Bardi, where his coming, he knew, was anxiously awaited.  He felt the scene of his entrance beforehand: the joy beaming diffusedly in the blind face like the light in a semi-transparent lamp; the transient pink flush on Romola's face and neck, which subtracted nothing from her majesty, but only gave it the exquisite charm of womanly sensitiveness, heightened still more by what seemed the paradoxical boy-like frankness of her look and smile.  They were the best comrades in the world during the hours they passed together round the blind man's chair: she was constantly appealing to Tito, and he was informing her, yet he felt himself strangely in subjection to Romola with that simplicity of hers: he felt for the first time, without defining it to himself, that loving awe in the presence of noble womanhood, which is perhaps something like the worship paid of old to a great nature-goddess, who was not all-knowing, but whose life and power were something deeper and more primordial than knowledge.  They had never been alone together, and he could frame to himself no probable image of love-scenes between them: he could only fancy and wish wildly--what he knew was impossible--that Romola would some day tell him that she loved him.  One day in Greece, as he was leaning over a wall in the sunshine, a little black-eyed peasant girl, who had rested her water-po