out on the ground, take one into his lap, and leave it with the pages unturned.  These moods would alternate with hours of extreme restlessness, during which he mysteriously absented himself.  He bore the heat of the Italian summer like a salamander, and used to start off at high noon for long walks over the hills.  He often went down into Florence, rambled through her close, dim streets, and lounged away mornings in the churches and galleries.  On many of these occasions Rowland bore him company, for they were the times when he was most like his former self.  Before Michael Angelo’s statues and the pictures of the early Tuscans, he quite forgot his own infelicities, and picked up the thread of his old aesthetic loquacity.  He had a particular fondness for Andrea del Sarto, and affirmed that if he had been a painter he would have taken the author of the Madonna del Sacco for his model.  He found in Florence some of his Roman friends, and went down on certain evenings to meet them.  More than once he asked Mary Garland to go with him into town, and showed her the things he most cared for.  He had some modeling clay brought up to the villa and deposited in a room suitable for his work; but when this had been done he turned the key in the door and the clay never was touched.  His eye was heavy and his hand cold, and his mother put up a secret prayer that he might be induced to see a doctor.  But on a certain occasion, when her prayer became articulate, he had a great outburst of anger and begged her to know, once for all, that his health was better than it had ever been.  On the whole, and most of the time, he was a sad spectacle; he looked so hopelessly idle.  If he was not querulous and bitter, it was because he had taken an extraordinary vow not to be; a vow heroic, for him, a vow which those who knew him well had the tenderness to appreciate.  Talking with him was like skating on thin ice, and his companions had a constant mental vision of spots designated “dangerous.”

This was a difficult time for Rowland; he said to himself that he would endure it to the end, but that it must be his last adventure of the kind.  Mrs. Hudson divided her time between looking askance at her son, with her hands tightly clasped about her pocket-handkerchief, as if she were wringing it dry of the last hour’s tears, and turning her eyes much more directly upon Rowland, in the mutest, the feeblest, the most intolerable reproachfulness.  She never phrased her accusations, but he felt that in the unillumined void of the poor lady’s mind they loomed up like vaguely-outlined monsters.  Her demeanor caused him the acutest suffering, and if, at the outset of his enterprise, he had seen, how dimly soever, one of those plaintive eye-beams in the opposite scale, the brilliancy of Roderick’s promises would have counted for little.  They made their way to the softest spot in his conscience and kept it chronically aching.  If Mrs. Hudson had been loquacious and vulgar, he would have borne