“Mrs. Light has sent for me to remonstrate with her daughter, with whom she has taken it into her head that I have influence.  I don’t know to what extent I shall remonstrate, but I give you notice I shall not speak in your interest.”

Roderick looked at him a moment with a lazy radiance in his eyes.  “Pray don’t!” he simply answered.

“You deserve I should tell her you are a very shabby fellow.”

“My dear Rowland, the comfort with you is that I can trust you.  You ’re incapable of doing anything disloyal.”

“You mean to lie here, then, smelling your roses and nursing your visions, and leaving your mother and Miss Garland to fall ill with anxiety?”

“Can I go and flaunt my felicity in their faces?  Wait till I get used to it a trifle.  I have done them a palpable wrong, but I can at least forbear to add insult to injury.  I may be an arrant fool, but, for the moment, I have taken it into my head to be prodigiously pleased.  I should n’t be able to conceal it; my pleasure would offend them; so I lock myself up as a dangerous character.”

“Well, I can only say, ’May your pleasure never grow less, or your danger greater!’”

Roderick closed his eyes again, and sniffed at his rose.  “God’s will be done!”

On this Rowland left him and repaired directly to Mrs. Light’s.  This afflicted lady hurried forward to meet him.  Since the Cavaliere’s report of her condition she had somewhat smoothed and trimmed the exuberance of her distress, but she was evidently in extreme tribulation, and she clutched Rowland by his two hands, as if, in the shipwreck of her hopes, he were her single floating spar.  Rowland greatly pitied her, for there is something respectable in passionate grief, even in a very bad cause; and as pity is akin to love, he endured her rather better than he had done hitherto.

“Speak to her, plead with her, command her!” she cried, pressing and shaking his hands.  “She ’ll not heed us, no more than if we were a pair of clocks a-ticking.  Perhaps she will listen to you; she always liked you.”

“She always disliked me,” said Rowland.  “But that does n’t matter now.  I have come here simply because you sent for me, not because I can help you.  I cannot advise your daughter.”

“Oh, cruel, deadly man!  You must advise her; you shan’t leave this house till you have advised her!” the poor woman passionately retorted.  “Look at me in my misery and refuse to help me!  Oh, you need n’t be afraid, I know I ’m a fright, I have n’t an idea what I have on.  If this goes on, we may both as well turn scarecrows.  If ever a woman was desperate, frantic, heart-broken, I am that woman.  I can’t begin to tell you.  To have nourished a serpent, sir, all these years! to have lavished one’s self upon a viper that turns and stings her own poor mother!  To have toiled and prayed, to have pushed and struggled, to have eaten the bread of bitterness,