She looked at him and then at the flower; he wondered whether she would shriek and swoon, as Miss Light had done.  “I wish it were something better!” she said simply; and then stood watching him, while he began to clamber.  Rowland was not shaped for an acrobat, and his enterprise was difficult; but he kept his wits about him, made the most of narrow foot-holds and coigns of vantage, and at last secured his prize.  He managed to stick it into his buttonhole and then he contrived to descend.  There was more than one chance for an ugly fall, but he evaded them all.  It was doubtless not gracefully done, but it was done, and that was all he had proposed to himself.  He was red in the face when he offered Miss Garland the flower, and she was visibly pale.  She had watched him without moving.  All this had passed without the knowledge of Mrs. Hudson, who was dozing beneath the hood of the carriage.  Mary Garland’s eyes did not perhaps display that ardent admiration which was formerly conferred by the queen of beauty at a tournament; but they expressed something in which Rowland found his reward.  “Why did you do that?” she asked, gravely.

He hesitated.  He felt that it was physically possible to say, “Because I love you!” but that it was not morally possible.  He lowered his pitch and answered, simply, “Because I wanted to do something for you.”

“Suppose you had fallen,” said Miss Garland.

“I believed I would not fall.  And you believed it, I think.”

“I believed nothing.  I simply trusted you, as you asked me.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum!” cried Rowland.  “I think you know Latin.”

When our four friends were established in what I have called their grassy valley, there was a good deal of scrambling over slopes both grassy and stony, a good deal of flower-plucking on narrow ledges, a great many long walks, and, thanks to the lucid mountain air, not a little exhilaration.  Mrs. Hudson was obliged to intermit her suspicions of the deleterious atmosphere of the old world, and to acknowledge the edifying purity of the breezes of Engelthal.  She was certainly more placid than she had been in Italy; having always lived in the country, she had missed in Rome and Florence that social solitude mitigated by bushes and rocks which is so dear to the true New England temperament.  The little unpainted inn at Engelthal, with its plank partitions, its milk-pans standing in the sun, its “help,” in the form of angular young women of the country-side, reminded her of places of summer sojourn in her native land; and the beautiful historic chambers of the Villa Pandolfini passed from her memory without a regret, and without having in the least modified her ideal of domiciliary grace.  Roderick had changed his sky, but he had not changed his mind; his humor was still that of which he had given Rowland a glimpse in that tragic explosion on the Lake of Como.  He kept his despair to himself, and he went doggedly about the ordinary