Mrs. Hudson surreptitiously wrung her hands.  “Listen to him, please!” she cried.  “Not leave Rome, when we have staid here later than any Christians ever did before!  It ’s this dreadful place that has made us so unhappy.”

“That ’s very true,” said Roderick, serenely.  “If I had not come to Rome, I would n’t have risen, and if I had not risen, I should n’t have fallen.”

“Fallen—­fallen!” murmured Mrs. Hudson.  “Just hear him!”

“I will do anything you say, Rowland,” Roderick added.  “I will do anything you want.  I have not been unkind to my mother—­have I, mother?  I was unkind yesterday, without meaning it; for after all, all that had to be said.  Murder will out, and my low spirits can’t be hidden.  But we talked it over and made it up, did n’t we?  It seemed to me we did.  Let Rowland decide it, mother; whatever he suggests will be the right thing.”  And Roderick, who had hardly removed his eyes from the statues, got up again and went back to look at them.

Mrs. Hudson fixed her eyes upon the floor in silence.  There was not a trace in Roderick’s face, or in his voice, of the bitterness of his emotion of the day before, and not a hint of his having the lightest weight upon his conscience.  He looked at Rowland with his frank, luminous eye as if there had never been a difference of opinion between them; as if each had ever been for both, unalterably, and both for each.

Rowland had received a few days before a letter from a lady of his acquaintance, a worthy Scotswoman domiciled in a villa upon one of the olive-covered hills near Florence.  She held her apartment in the villa upon a long lease, and she enjoyed for a sum not worth mentioning the possession of an extraordinary number of noble, stone-floored rooms, with ceilings vaulted and frescoed, and barred windows commanding the loveliest view in the world.  She was a needy and thrifty spinster, who never hesitated to declare that the lovely view was all very well, but that for her own part she lived in the villa for cheapness, and that if she had a clear three hundred pounds a year she would go and really enjoy life near her sister, a baronet’s lady, at Glasgow.  She was now proposing to make a visit to that exhilarating city, and she desired to turn an honest penny by sub-letting for a few weeks her historic Italian chambers.  The terms on which she occupied them enabled her to ask a rent almost jocosely small, and she begged Rowland to do what she called a little genteel advertising for her.  Would he say a good word for her rooms to his numerous friends, as they left Rome?  He said a good word for them now to Mrs. Hudson, and told her in dollars and cents how cheap a summer’s lodging she might secure.  He dwelt upon the fact that she would strike a truce with tables-d’hote and have a cook of her own, amenable possibly to instruction in the Northampton mysteries.  He had touched a tender chord; Mrs. Hudson became almost cheerful.