all modern sculpture seems to me weak, and that the only things I care for are some of the most battered of the antiques of the Vatican.  No, no, I can’t reassure you; and when you tell me—­with a confidence in my discretion of which, certainly, I am duly sensible—­that at times you feel terribly small, why, I can only answer, ‘Ah, then, my poor friend, I am afraid you are small.’  The language I should like to hear, from a certain person, would be the language of absolute decision.”

Roderick raised his head, but he said nothing; he seemed to be exchanging a long glance with his companion.  The result of it was to make him fling himself back with an inarticulate murmur.  Rowland, admonished by the silence, was on the point of turning away, but he was arrested by a gesture of the young girl.  She pointed for a moment into the blue air.  Roderick followed the direction of her gesture.

“Is that little flower we see outlined against that dark niche,” she asked, “as intensely blue as it looks through my veil?” She spoke apparently with the amiable design of directing the conversation into a less painful channel.

Rowland, from where he stood, could see the flower she meant—­a delicate plant of radiant hue, which sprouted from the top of an immense fragment of wall some twenty feet from Christina’s place.

Roderick turned his head and looked at it without answering.  At last, glancing round, “Put up your veil!” he said.  Christina complied.  “Does it look as blue now?” he asked.

“Ah, what a lovely color!” she murmured, leaning her head on one side.

“Would you like to have it?”

She stared a moment and then broke into a light laugh.

“Would you like to have it?” he repeated in a ringing voice.

“Don’t look as if you would eat me up,” she answered.  “It ’s harmless if I say yes!”

Roderick rose to his feet and stood looking at the little flower.  It was separated from the ledge on which he stood by a rugged surface of vertical wall, which dropped straight into the dusky vaults behind the arena.  Suddenly he took off his hat and flung it behind him.  Christina then sprang to her feet.

“I will bring it you,” he said.

She seized his arm.  “Are you crazy?  Do you mean to kill yourself?”

“I shall not kill myself.  Sit down!”

“Excuse me.  Not till you do!” And she grasped his arm with both hands.

Roderick shook her off and pointed with a violent gesture to her former place.  “Go there!” he cried fiercely.

“You can never, never!” she murmured beseechingly, clasping her hands.  “I implore you!”

Roderick turned and looked at her, and then in a voice which Rowland had never heard him use, a voice almost thunderous, a voice which awakened the echoes of the mighty ruin, he repeated, “Sit down!” She hesitated a moment and then she dropped on the ground and buried her face in her hands.