Rowland made no answer; his face at this moment resembled the tragic mask much more than the comic.  But Miss Garland was not looking at him; she had taken up her Murray again.

In the afternoon she usually drove with Mrs. Hudson, but Rowland frequently saw her again in the evening.  He was apt to spend half an hour in the little sitting-room at the hotel-pension on the slope of the Pincian, and Roderick, who dined regularly with his mother, was present on these occasions.  Rowland saw him little at other times, and for three weeks no observations passed between them on the subject of Mrs. Hudson’s advent.  To Rowland’s vision, as the weeks elapsed, the benefits to proceed from the presence of the two ladies remained shrouded in mystery.  Roderick was peculiarly inscrutable.  He was preoccupied with his work on his mother’s portrait, which was taking a very happy turn; and often, when he sat silent, with his hands in his pockets, his legs outstretched, his head thrown back, and his eyes on vacancy, it was to be supposed that his fancy was hovering about the half-shaped image in his studio, exquisite even in its immaturity.  He said little, but his silence did not of necessity imply disaffection, for he evidently found it a deep personal luxury to lounge away the hours in an atmosphere so charged with feminine tenderness.  He was not alert, he suggested nothing in the way of excursions (Rowland was the prime mover in such as were attempted), but he conformed passively at least to the tranquil temper of the two women, and made no harsh comments nor sombre allusions.  Rowland wondered whether he had, after all, done his friend injustice in denying him the sentiment of duty.  He refused invitations, to Rowland’s knowledge, in order to dine at the jejune little table-d’hote; wherever his spirit might be, he was present in the flesh with religious constancy.  Mrs. Hudson’s felicity betrayed itself in a remarkable tendency to finish her sentences and wear her best black silk gown.  Her tremors had trembled away; she was like a child who discovers that the shaggy monster it has so long been afraid to touch is an inanimate terror, compounded of straw and saw-dust, and that it is even a safe audacity to tickle its nose.  As to whether the love-knot of which Mary Garland had the keeping still held firm, who should pronounce?  The young girl, as we know, did not wear it on her sleeve.  She always sat at the table, near the candles, with a piece of needle-work.  This was the attitude in which Rowland had first seen her, and he thought, now that he had seen her in several others, it was not the least becoming.

CHAPTER X. The Cavaliere

There befell at last a couple of days during which Rowland was unable to go to the hotel.  Late in the evening of the second one Roderick came into his room.  In a few moments he announced that he had finished the bust of his mother.

“And it ’s magnificent!” he declared.  “It ’s one of the best things I have done.”