“Cousin Sarah, the other evening,” she said, “asked you to please leave us.  I think she hardly knew what she was saying, and I hope you have not taken offense.”

“By no means; but I honestly believe that my leaving you would contribute greatly to Mrs. Hudson’s comfort.  I can be your hidden providence, you know; I can watch you at a distance, and come upon the scene at critical moments.”

Miss Garland looked for a moment at the ground; and then, with sudden earnestness, “I beg you to come with us!” she said.

It need hardly be added that after this Rowland went with them.

CHAPTER XII.  The Princess Casamassima

Rowland had a very friendly memory of a little mountain inn, accessible with moderate trouble from Lucerne, where he had once spent a blissful ten days.  He had at that time been trudging, knapsack on back, over half Switzerland, and not being, on his legs, a particularly light weight, it was no shame to him to confess that he was mortally tired.  The inn of which I speak presented striking analogies with a cow-stable; but in spite of this circumstance, it was crowded with hungry tourists.  It stood in a high, shallow valley, with flower-strewn Alpine meadows sloping down to it from the base of certain rugged rocks whose outlines were grotesque against the evening sky.  Rowland had seen grander places in Switzerland that pleased him less, and whenever afterwards he wished to think of Alpine opportunities at their best, he recalled this grassy concave among the mountain-tops, and the August days he spent there, resting deliciously, at his length, in the lee of a sun-warmed boulder, with the light cool air stirring about his temples, the wafted odors of the pines in his nostrils, the tinkle of the cattle-bells in his ears, the vast progression of the mountain shadows before his eyes, and a volume of Wordsworth in his pocket.  His face, on the Swiss hill-sides, had been scorched to within a shade of the color nowadays called magenta, and his bed was a pallet in a loft, which he shared with a German botanist of colossal stature—­every inch of him quaking at an open window.  These had been drawbacks to felicity, but Rowland hardly cared where or how he was lodged, for he spent the livelong day under the sky, on the crest of a slope that looked at the Jungfrau.  He remembered all this on leaving Florence with his friends, and he reflected that, as the midseason was over, accommodations would be more ample, and charges more modest.  He communicated with his old friend the landlord, and, while September was yet young, his companions established themselves under his guidance in the grassy valley.