of the adventures of the two ladies from Northampton.  Miss Garland’s wish, at Leghorn, on finding they were left at the mercy of circumstances, had been to telegraph to Roderick and await an answer; for she knew that their arrival was a trifle premature.  But Mrs. Hudson’s maternal heart had taken the alarm.  Roderick’s sending for them was, to her imagination, a confession of illness, and his not being at Leghorn, a proof of it; an hour’s delay was therefore cruel both to herself and to him.  She insisted on immediate departure; and, unskilled as they were in the mysteries of foreign (or even of domestic) travel, they had hurried in trembling eagerness to Rome.  They had arrived late in the evening, and, knowing nothing of inns, had got into a cab and proceeded to Roderick’s lodging.  At the door, poor Mrs. Hudson’s frightened anxiety had overcome her, and she had sat quaking and crying in the vehicle, too weak to move.  Miss Garland had bravely gone in, groped her way up the dusky staircase, reached Roderick’s door, and, with the assistance of such acquaintance with the Italian tongue as she had culled from a phrase-book during the calmer hours of the voyage, had learned from the old woman who had her cousin’s household economy in charge that he was in the best of health and spirits, and had gone forth a few hours before with his hat on his ear, per divertirsi.

These things Rowland learned during a visit he paid the two ladies the evening after their arrival.  Mrs. Hudson spoke of them at great length and with an air of clinging confidence in Rowland which told him how faithfully time had served him, in her imagination.  But her fright was over, though she was still catching her breath a little, like a person dragged ashore out of waters uncomfortably deep.  She was excessively bewildered and confused, and seemed more than ever to demand a tender handling from her friends.  Before Miss Garland, Rowland was distinctly conscious that he trembled.  He wondered extremely what was going on in her mind; what was her silent commentary on the incidents of the night before.  He wondered all the more, because he immediately perceived that she was greatly changed since their parting, and that the change was by no means for the worse.  She was older, easier, more free, more like a young woman who went sometimes into company.  She had more beauty as well, inasmuch as her beauty before had been the depth of her expression, and the sources from which this beauty was fed had in these two years evidently not wasted themselves.  Rowland felt almost instantly—­he could hardly have said why:  it was in her voice, in her tone, in the air—­that a total change had passed over her attitude towards himself.  She trusted him now, absolutely; whether or no she liked him, she believed he was solid.  He felt that during the coming weeks he would need to be solid.  Mrs. Hudson was at one of the smaller hotels, and her sitting-room was frugally lighted by a couple of candles.