“How will you get through it with me?  That ’s the question.”

“I don’t pretend to say; the future is a dead blank.  But without you it ’s not a blank—­it ’s certain damnation!”

“Mercy, mercy!” murmured Mrs. Hudson.

Rowland made an effort to stand firm, and for a moment succeeded.  “If I go with you, will you try to work?”

Roderick, up to this moment, had been looking as unperturbed as if the deep agitation of the day before were a thing of the remote past.  But at these words his face changed formidably; he flushed and scowled, and all his passion returned.  “Try to work!” he cried.  “Try—­try! work—­work!  In God’s name don’t talk that way, or you ’ll drive me mad!  Do you suppose I ’m trying not to work?  Do you suppose I stand rotting here for the fun of it?  Don’t you suppose I would try to work for myself before I tried for you?”

“Mr. Mallet,” cried Mrs. Hudson, piteously, “will you leave me alone with this?”

Rowland turned to her and informed her, gently, that he would go with her to Florence.  After he had so pledged himself he thought not at all of the pain of his position as mediator between the mother’s resentful grief and the son’s incurable weakness; he drank deep, only, of the satisfaction of not separating from Mary Garland.  If the future was a blank to Roderick, it was hardly less so to himself.  He had at moments a lively foreboding of impending calamity.  He paid it no especial deference, but it made him feel indisposed to take the future into his account.  When, on his going to take leave of Madame Grandoni, this lady asked at what time he would come back to Rome, he answered that he was coming back either never or forever.  When she asked him what he meant, he said he really could n’t tell her, and parted from her with much genuine emotion; the more so, doubtless, that she blessed him in a quite loving, maternal fashion, and told him she honestly believed him to be the best fellow in the world.

The Villa Pandolfini stood directly upon a small grass-grown piazza, on the top of a hill which sloped straight from one of the gates of Florence.  It offered to the outer world a long, rather low facade, colored a dull, dark yellow, and pierced with windows of various sizes, no one of which, save those on the ground floor, was on the same level with any other.  Within, it had a great, cool, gray cortile, with high, light arches around it, heavily-corniced doors, of majestic altitude, opening out of it, and a beautiful mediaeval well on one side of it.  Mrs. Hudson’s rooms opened into a small garden supported on immense substructions, which were planted on the farther side of the hill, as it sloped steeply away.  This garden was a charming place.  Its south wall was curtained with a dense orange vine, a dozen fig-trees offered you their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft, grave Tuscan landscape kept you company.  The rooms themselves were as high as chapels and as