even a less valid persecution with greater fortitude.  But somehow, neat and noiseless and dismally lady-like, as she sat there, keeping her grievance green with her soft-dropping tears, her displeasure conveyed an overwhelming imputation of brutality.  He felt like a reckless trustee who has speculated with the widow’s mite, and is haunted with the reflection of ruin that he sees in her tearful eyes.  He did everything conceivable to be polite to Mrs. Hudson, and to treat her with distinguished deference.  Perhaps his exasperated nerves made him overshoot the mark, and rendered his civilities a trifle peremptory.  She seemed capable of believing that he was trying to make a fool of her; she would have thought him cruelly recreant if he had suddenly departed in desperation, and yet she gave him no visible credit for his constancy.  Women are said by some authorities to be cruel; I don’t know how true this is, but it may at least be pertinent to remark that Mrs. Hudson was very much of a woman.  It often seemed to Rowland that he had too decidedly forfeited his freedom, and that there was something positively grotesque in a man of his age and circumstances living in such a moral bondage.

But Mary Garland had helped him before, and she helped him now—­helped him not less than he had assured himself she would when he found himself drifting to Florence.  Yet her help was rendered in the same unconscious, unacknowledged fashion as before; there was no explicit change in their relations.  After that distressing scene in Rome which had immediately preceded their departure, it was of course impossible that there should not be on Miss Garland’s part some frankness of allusion to Roderick’s sad condition.  She had been present, the reader will remember, during only half of his unsparing confession, and Rowland had not seen her confronted with any absolute proof of Roderick’s passion for Christina Light.  But he knew that she knew far too much for her happiness; Roderick had told him, shortly after their settlement at the Villa Pandolfini, that he had had a “tremendous talk” with his cousin.  Rowland asked no questions about it; he preferred not to know what had passed between them.  If their interview had been purely painful, he wished to ignore it for Miss Garland’s sake; and if it had sown the seeds of reconciliation, he wished to close his eyes to it for his own—­for the sake of that unshaped idea, forever dismissed and yet forever present, which hovered in the background of his consciousness, with a hanging head, as it were, and yet an unshamed glance, and whose lightest motions were an effectual bribe to patience.  Was the engagement broken?  Rowland wondered, yet without asking.  But it hardly mattered, for if, as was more than probable, Miss Garland had peremptorily released her cousin, her own heart had by no means recovered its liberty.  It was very certain to Rowland’s mind that if she had given him up she had by no means ceased to care for him passionately, and that, to exhaust her