“Your perplexities are so terribly comprehensive,” said Rowland, smiling, “that one hardly knows where to meet them first.”

“I don’t care much for anything you can say, because it ’s sure to be half-hearted.  You are not in the least contented, yourself.”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, I am an observer!”

“No one is absolutely contented, I suppose, but I assure you I complain of nothing.”

“So much the worse for your honesty.  To begin with, you are in love.”

“You would not have me complain of that!”

“And it does n’t go well.  There are grievous obstacles.  So much I know!  You need n’t protest; I ask no questions.  You will tell no one—­me least of all.  Why does one never see you?”

“Why, if I came to see you,” said Rowland, deliberating, “it would n’t be, it could n’t be, for a trivial reason—­because I had not been in a month, because I was passing, because I admire you.  It would be because I should have something very particular to say.  I have not come, because I have been slow in making up my mind to say it.”

“You are simply cruel.  Something particular, in this ocean of inanities?  In common charity, speak!”

“I doubt whether you will like it.”

“Oh, I hope to heaven it ’s not a compliment!”

“It may be called a compliment to your reasonableness.  You perhaps remember that I gave you a hint of it the other day at Frascati.”

“Has it been hanging fire all this time?  Explode!  I promise not to stop my ears.”

“It relates to my friend Hudson.”  And Rowland paused.  She was looking at him expectantly; her face gave no sign.  “I am rather disturbed in mind about him.  He seems to me at times to be in an unpromising way.”  He paused again, but Christina said nothing.  “The case is simply this,” he went on.  “It was by my advice he renounced his career at home and embraced his present one.  I made him burn his ships.  I brought him to Rome, I launched him in the world, and I stand surety, in a measure, to—­to his mother, for his prosperity.  It is not such smooth sailing as it might be, and I am inclined to put up prayers for fair winds.  If he is to succeed, he must work—­quietly, devotedly.  It is not news to you, I imagine, that Hudson is a great admirer of yours.”

Christina remained silent; she turned away her eyes with an air, not of confusion, but of deep deliberation.  Surprising frankness had, as a general thing, struck Rowland as the key-note of her character, but she had more than once given him a suggestion of an unfathomable power of calculation, and her silence now had something which it is hardly extravagant to call portentous.  He had of course asked himself how far it was questionable taste to inform an unprotected girl, for the needs of a cause, that another man admired her; the thing, superficially, had an uncomfortable analogy with the shrewdness that uses a cat’s paw and lets it risk being singed.  But he decided that even rigid discretion is not bound to take a young lady at more than her own valuation, and Christina presently reassured him as to the limits of her susceptibility.  “Mr. Hudson is in love with me!” she said.