liked him well enough to forgive him an injury.  It was partly, Rowland fancied, that there were occasional lapses, deep and sweet, in her sense of injury.  When, on arriving at Florence, she saw the place Rowland had brought them to in their trouble, she had given him a look and said a few words to him that had seemed not only a remission of guilt but a positive reward.  This happened in the court of the villa—­the large gray quadrangle, overstretched, from edge to edge of the red-tiled roof, by the soft Italian sky.  Mary had felt on the spot the sovereign charm of the place; it was reflected in her deeply intelligent glance, and Rowland immediately accused himself of not having done the villa justice.  Miss Garland took a mighty fancy to Florence, and used to look down wistfully at the towered city from the windows and garden.  Roderick having now no pretext for not being her cicerone, Rowland was no longer at liberty, as he had been in Rome, to propose frequent excursions to her.  Roderick’s own invitations, however, were not frequent, and Rowland more than once ventured to introduce her to a gallery or a church.  These expeditions were not so blissful, to his sense, as the rambles they had taken together in Rome, for his companion only half surrendered herself to her enjoyment, and seemed to have but a divided attention at her command.  Often, when she had begun with looking intently at a picture, her silence, after an interval, made him turn and glance at her.  He usually found that if she was looking at the picture still, she was not seeing it.  Her eyes were fixed, but her thoughts were wandering, and an image more vivid than any that Raphael or Titian had drawn had superposed itself upon the canvas.  She asked fewer questions than before, and seemed to have lost heart for consulting guide-books and encyclopaedias.  From time to time, however, she uttered a deep, full murmur of gratification.  Florence in midsummer was perfectly void of travelers, and the dense little city gave forth its aesthetic aroma with a larger frankness, as the nightingale sings when the listeners have departed.  The churches were deliciously cool, but the gray streets were stifling, and the great, dove-tailed polygons of pavement as hot to the tread as molten lava.  Rowland, who suffered from intense heat, would have found all this uncomfortable in solitude; but Florence had never charmed him so completely as during these midsummer strolls with his preoccupied companion.  One evening they had arranged to go on the morrow to the Academy.  Miss Garland kept her appointment, but as soon as she appeared, Rowland saw that something painful had befallen her.  She was doing her best to look at her ease, but her face bore the marks of tears.  Rowland told her that he was afraid she was ill, and that if she preferred to give up the visit to Florence he would submit with what grace he might.  She hesitated a moment, and then said she preferred to adhere to their plan.  “I am not well,” she presently added, “but it ’s a moral malady, and in such cases I consider your company beneficial.”