satisfied him of the identity of the lady.  He had been unjust to poor Assunta, sitting patient in the gloomy arena; she had not come on her own errand.  Rowland’s discoveries made him hesitate.  Should he retire as noiselessly as possible, or should he call out a friendly good morning?  While he was debating the question, he found himself distinctly hearing his friends’ words.  They were of such a nature as to make him unwilling to retreat, and yet to make it awkward to be discovered in a position where it would be apparent that he had heard them.

“If what you say is true,” said Christina, with her usual soft deliberateness—­it made her words rise with peculiar distinctness to Rowland’s ear—­“you are simply weak.  I am sorry!  I hoped—­I really believed—­you were not.”

“No, I am not weak,” answered Roderick, with vehemence; “I maintain that I am not weak!  I am incomplete, perhaps; but I can’t help that.  Weakness is a man’s own fault!”

“Incomplete, then!” said Christina, with a laugh.  “It ’s the same thing, so long as it keeps you from splendid achievement.  Is it written, then, that I shall really never know what I have so often dreamed of?”

“What have you dreamed of?”

“A man whom I can perfectly respect!” cried the young girl, with a sudden flame.  “A man, at least, whom I can unrestrictedly admire.  I meet one, as I have met more than one before, whom I fondly believe to be cast in a larger mould than most of the vile human breed, to be large in character, great in talent, strong in will!  In such a man as that, I say, one’s weary imagination at last may rest; or it may wander if it will, yet never need to wander far from the deeps where one’s heart is anchored.  When I first knew you, I gave no sign, but you had struck me.  I observed you, as women observe, and I fancied you had the sacred fire.”

“Before heaven, I believe I have!” cried Roderick.

“Ah, but so little!  It flickers and trembles and sputters; it goes out, you tell me, for whole weeks together.  From your own account, it ’s ten to one that in the long run you ’re a failure.”

“I say those things sometimes myself, but when I hear you say them they make me feel as if I could work twenty years at a sitting, on purpose to refute you!”

“Ah, the man who is strong with what I call strength,” Christina replied, “would neither rise nor fall by anything I could say!  I am a poor, weak woman; I have no strength myself, and I can give no strength.  I am a miserable medley of vanity and folly.  I am silly, I am ignorant, I am affected, I am false.  I am the fruit of a horrible education, sown on a worthless soil.  I am all that, and yet I believe I have one merit!  I should know a great character when I saw it, and I should delight in it with a generosity which would do something toward the remission of my sins.  For a man who should really give me a certain feeling—­which I have never had, but which I should know when it came—­I