of the Chair seemed, in its soft serenity, to mock him with the suggestion of unattainable repose.  He lingered on the bridges at sunset, and knew that the light was enchanting and the mountains divine, but there seemed to be something horribly invidious and unwelcome in the fact.  He felt, in a word, like a man who has been cruelly defrauded and who wishes to have his revenge.  Life owed him, he thought, a compensation, and he would be restless and resentful until he found it.  He knew—­or he seemed to know—­where he should find it; but he hardly told himself, and thought of the thing under mental protest, as a man in want of money may think of certain funds that he holds in trust.  In his melancholy meditations the idea of something better than all this, something that might softly, richly interpose, something that might reconcile him to the future, something that might make one’s tenure of life deep and zealous instead of harsh and uneven—­the idea of concrete compensation, in a word—­shaped itself sooner or later into the image of Mary Garland.

Very odd, you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still be brooding over a plain girl of whom he had had but the lightest of glimpses two years before; very odd that so deep an impression should have been made by so lightly-pressed an instrument.  We must admit the oddity and offer simply in explanation that his sentiment apparently belonged to that species of emotion of which, by the testimony of the poets, the very name and essence is oddity.  One night he slept but half an hour; he found his thoughts taking a turn which excited him portentously.  He walked up and down his room half the night.  It looked out on the Arno; the noise of the river came in at the open window; he felt like dressing and going down into the streets.  Toward morning he flung himself into a chair; though he was wide awake he was less excited.  It seemed to him that he saw his idea from the outside, that he judged it and condemned it; yet it stood there before him, distinct, and in a certain way imperious.  During the day he tried to banish it and forget it; but it fascinated, haunted, at moments frightened him.  He tried to amuse himself, paid visits, resorted to several rather violent devices for diverting his thoughts.  If on the morrow he had committed a crime, the persons whom he had seen that day would have testified that he had talked strangely and had not seemed like himself.  He felt certainly very unlike himself; long afterwards, in retrospect, he used to reflect that during those days he had for a while been literally beside himself.  His idea persisted; it clung to him like a sturdy beggar.  The sense of the matter, roughly expressed, was this:  If Roderick was really going, as he himself had phrased it, to “fizzle out,” one might help him on the way—­one might smooth the descensus Averno.  For forty-eight hours there swam before Rowland’s eyes a vision of Roderick, graceful and beautiful as he passed, plunging,