“I must do without your help then!  Your conditions are impossible.  I will leave Rome at the time I have always intended—­at the end of June.  My rooms and my mother’s are taken till then; all my arrangements are made accordingly.  Then, I will depart; not before.”

“You are not frank,” said Rowland.  “Your real reason for staying has nothing to do with your rooms.”

Roderick’s face betrayed neither embarrassment nor resentment.  “If I ’m not frank, it ’s for the first time in my life.  Since you know so much about my real reason, let me hear it!  No, stop!” he suddenly added, “I won’t trouble you.  You are right, I have a motive.  On the twenty-fourth of June Miss Light is to be married.  I take an immense interest in all that concerns her, and I wish to be present at her wedding.”

“But you said the other day at Saint Peter’s that it was by no means certain her marriage would take place.”

“Apparently I was wrong:  the invitations, I am told, are going out.”

Rowland felt that it would be utterly vain to remonstrate, and that the only thing for him was to make the best terms possible.  “If I offer no further opposition to your waiting for Miss Light’s marriage,” he said, “will you promise, meanwhile and afterwards, for a certain period, to defer to my judgment—­to say nothing that may be a cause of suffering to Miss Garland?”

“For a certain period?  What period?” Roderick demanded.

“Ah, don’t drive so close a bargain!  Don’t you understand that I have taken you away from her, that I suffer in every nerve in consequence, and that I must do what I can to restore you?”

“Do what you can, then,” said Roderick gravely, putting out his hand.  “Do what you can!” His tone and his hand-shake seemed to constitute a promise, and upon this they parted.

Roderick’s bust of his mother, whether or no it was a discharge of what he called the filial debt, was at least a most admirable production.  Rowland, at the time it was finished, met Gloriani one evening, and this unscrupulous genius immediately began to ask questions about it.  “I am told our high-flying friend has come down,” he said.  “He has been doing a queer little old woman.”

“A queer little old woman!” Rowland exclaimed.  “My dear sir, she is Hudson’s mother.”

“All the more reason for her being queer!  It is a bust for terra-cotta, eh?”

“By no means; it is for marble.”

“That ’s a pity.  It was described to me as a charming piece of quaintness:  a little demure, thin-lipped old lady, with her head on one side, and the prettiest wrinkles in the world—­a sort of fairy godmother.”

“Go and see it, and judge for yourself,” said Rowland.

“No, I see I shall be disappointed.  It ’s quite the other thing, the sort of thing they put into the campo-santos.  I wish that boy would listen to me an hour!”