Roderick frowned darkly, but assented.

“It would give you pleasure, then, to see her?”

Roderick turned away and for some moments answered nothing.  “Pleasure!” he said at last, huskily.  “Call it pain.”

“I regard you as a sick man,” Rowland continued.  “In such a case Miss Garland would say that her place was at your side.”

Roderick looked at him some time askance, mistrustfully.  “Is this a deep-laid snare?” he asked slowly.

Rowland had come back with all his patience rekindled, but these words gave it an almost fatal chill.  “Heaven forgive you!” he cried bitterly.  “My idea has been simply this.  Try, in decency, to understand it.  I have tried to befriend you, to help you, to inspire you with confidence, and I have failed.  I took you from the hands of your mother and your betrothed, and it seemed to me my duty to restore you to their hands.  That ’s all I have to say.”

He was going, but Roderick forcibly detained him.  It would have been but a rough way of expressing it to say that one could never know how Roderick would take a thing.  It had happened more than once that when hit hard, deservedly, he had received the blow with touching gentleness.  On the other hand, he had often resented the softest taps.  The secondary effect of Rowland’s present admonition seemed reassuring.  “I beg you to wait,” he said, “to forgive that shabby speech, and to let me reflect.”  And he walked up and down awhile, reflecting.  At last he stopped, with a look in his face that Rowland had not seen all winter.  It was a strikingly beautiful look.

“How strange it is,” he said, “that the simplest devices are the last that occur to one!” And he broke into a light laugh.  “To see Mary Garland is just what I want.  And my mother—­my mother can’t hurt me now.”

“You will write, then?”

“I will telegraph.  They must come, at whatever cost.  Striker can arrange it all for them.”

In a couple of days he told Rowland that he had received a telegraphic answer to his message, informing him that the two ladies were to sail immediately for Leghorn, in one of the small steamers which ply between that port and New York.  They would arrive, therefore, in less than a month.  Rowland passed this month of expectation in no very serene frame of mind.  His suggestion had had its source in the deepest places of his agitated conscience; but there was something intolerable in the thought of the suffering to which the event was probably subjecting those undefended women.  They had scraped together their scanty funds and embarked, at twenty-four hours’ notice, upon the dreadful sea, to journey tremulously to shores darkened by the shadow of deeper alarms.  He could only promise himself to be their devoted friend and servant.  Preoccupied as he was, he was able to observe that expectation, with Roderick, took a form which seemed singular even among his characteristic singularities.  If redemption—­Roderick