Rowland had seen all this, and he saw more.  He saw Roderick clasp in his left arm the jagged corner of the vertical partition along which he proposed to pursue his crazy journey, stretch out his leg, and feel for a resting-place for his foot.  Rowland had measured with a glance the possibility of his sustaining himself, and pronounced it absolutely nil.  The wall was garnished with a series of narrow projections, the remains apparently of a brick cornice supporting the arch of a vault which had long since collapsed.  It was by lodging his toes on these loose brackets and grasping with his hands at certain mouldering protuberances on a level with his head, that Roderick intended to proceed.  The relics of the cornice were utterly worthless as a support.  Rowland had observed this, and yet, for a moment, he had hesitated.  If the thing were possible, he felt a sudden admiring glee at the thought of Roderick’s doing it.  It would be finely done, it would be gallant, it would have a sort of masculine eloquence as an answer to Christina’s sinister persiflage.  But it was not possible!  Rowland left his place with a bound, and scrambled down some neighboring steps, and the next moment a stronger pair of hands than Christina’s were laid upon Roderick’s shoulder.

He turned, staring, pale and angry.  Christina rose, pale and staring, too, but beautiful in her wonder and alarm.  “My dear Roderick,” said Rowland, “I am only preventing you from doing a very foolish thing.  That ’s an exploit for spiders, not for young sculptors of promise.”

Roderick wiped his forehead, looked back at the wall, and then closed his eyes, as if with a spasm, of retarded dizziness.  “I won’t resist you,” he said.  “But I have made you obey,” he added, turning to Christina.  “Am I weak now?”

She had recovered her composure; she looked straight past him and addressed Rowland:  “Be so good as to show me the way out of this horrible place!”

He helped her back into the corridor; Roderick followed after a short interval.  Of course, as they were descending the steps, came questions for Rowland to answer, and more or less surprise.  Where had he come from? how happened he to have appeared at just that moment?  Rowland answered that he had been rambling overhead, and that, looking out of an aperture, he had seen a gentleman preparing to undertake a preposterous gymnastic feat, and a lady swooning away in consequence.  Interference seemed justifiable, and he had made it as prompt as possible.  Roderick was far from hanging his head, like a man who has been caught in the perpetration of an extravagant folly; but if he held it more erect than usual Rowland believed that this was much less because he had made a show of personal daring than because he had triumphantly proved to Christina that, like a certain person she had dreamed of, he too could speak the language of decision.  Christina descended to the arena in silence, apparently occupied with her own thoughts.  She betrayed