cool as royal sepulchres.  Silence, peace, and security seemed to abide in the ancient house and make it an ideal refuge for aching hearts.  Mrs. Hudson had a stunted, brown-faced Maddalena, who wore a crimson handkerchief passed over her coarse, black locks and tied under her sharp, pertinacious chin, and a smile which was as brilliant as a prolonged flash of lightning.  She smiled at everything in life, especially the things she did n’t like and which kept her talent for mendacity in healthy exercise.  A glance, a word, a motion was sufficient to make her show her teeth at you like a cheerful she-wolf.  This inexpugnable smile constituted her whole vocabulary in her dealings with her melancholy mistress, to whom she had been bequeathed by the late occupant of the apartment, and who, to Rowland’s satisfaction, promised to be diverted from her maternal sorrows by the still deeper perplexities of Maddalena’s theory of roasting, sweeping, and bed-making.

Rowland took rooms at a villa a trifle nearer Florence, whence in the summer mornings he had five minutes’ walk in the sharp, black, shadow-strip projected by winding, flower-topped walls, to join his friends.  The life at the Villa Pandolfini, when it had fairly defined itself, was tranquil and monotonous, but it might have borrowed from exquisite circumstance an absorbing charm.  If a sensible shadow rested upon it, this was because it had an inherent vice; it was feigning a repose which it very scantily felt.  Roderick had lost no time in giving the full measure of his uncompromising chagrin, and as he was the central figure of the little group, as he held its heart-strings all in his own hand, it reflected faithfully the eclipse of his own genius.  No one had ventured upon the cheerful commonplace of saying that the change of air and of scene would restore his spirits; this would have had, under the circumstances, altogether too silly a sound.  The change in question had done nothing of the sort, and his companions had, at least, the comfort of their perspicacity.  An essential spring had dried up within him, and there was no visible spiritual law for making it flow again.  He was rarely violent, he expressed little of the irritation and ennui that he must have constantly felt; it was as if he believed that a spiritual miracle for his redemption was just barely possible, and was therefore worth waiting for.  The most that one could do, however, was to wait grimly and doggedly, suppressing an imprecation as, from time to time, one looked at one’s watch.  An attitude of positive urbanity toward life was not to be expected; it was doing one’s duty to hold one’s tongue and keep one’s hands off one’s own windpipe, and other people’s.  Roderick had long silences, fits of profound lethargy, almost of stupefaction.  He used to sit in the garden by the hour, with his head thrown back, his legs outstretched, his hands in his pockets, and his eyes fastened upon the blinding summer sky.  He would gather a dozen books about him, tumble them