The opportunity presenting itself the next day, he failed not, as you may imagine, to ask Mary Garland what she thought of Miss Light.  It was a Saturday afternoon, the time at which the beautiful marbles of the Villa Borghese are thrown open to the public.  Mary had told him that Roderick had promised to take her to see them, with his mother, and he joined the party in the splendid Casino.  The warm weather had left so few strangers in Rome that they had the place almost to themselves.  Mrs. Hudson had confessed to an invincible fear of treading, even with the help of her son’s arm, the polished marble floors, and was sitting patiently on a stool, with folded hands, looking shyly, here and there, at the undraped paganism around her.  Roderick had sauntered off alone, with an irritated brow, which seemed to betray the conflict between the instinct of observation and the perplexities of circumstance.  Miss Garland was wandering in another direction, and though she was consulting her catalogue, Rowland fancied it was from habit; she too was preoccupied.  He joined her, and she presently sat down on a divan, rather wearily, and closed her Murray.  Then he asked her abruptly how Christina had pleased her.

She started the least bit at the question, and he felt that she had been thinking of Christina.

“I don’t like her!” she said with decision.

“What do you think of her?”

“I think she ’s false.”  This was said without petulance or bitterness, but with a very positive air.

“But she wished to please you; she tried,” Rowland rejoined, in a moment.

“I think not.  She wished to please herself!”

Rowland felt himself at liberty to say no more.  No allusion to Christina had passed between them since the day they met her at Saint Peter’s, but he knew that she knew, by that infallible sixth sense of a woman who loves, that this strange, beautiful girl had the power to injure her.  To what extent she had the will, Mary was uncertain; but last night’s interview, apparently, had not reassured her.  It was, under these circumstances, equally unbecoming for Rowland either to depreciate or to defend Christina, and he had to content himself with simply having verified the girl’s own assurance that she had made a bad impression.  He tried to talk of indifferent matters—­about the statues and the frescoes; but to-day, plainly, aesthetic curiosity, with Miss Garland, had folded its wings.  Curiosity of another sort had taken its place.  Mary was longing, he was sure, to question him about Christina; but she found a dozen reasons for hesitating.  Her questions would imply that Roderick had not treated her with confidence, for information on this point should properly have come from him.  They would imply that she was jealous, and to betray her jealousy was intolerable to her pride.  For some minutes, as she sat scratching the brilliant pavement with the point of her umbrella, it was to be supposed that her pride and her anxiety held an earnest debate.  At last anxiety won.