had not yet seen her smile, but something assured him that her rigid gravity had a radiant counterpart.  She wore a scanty white dress, and had a nameless rustic air which would have led one to speak of her less as a young lady than as a young woman.  She was evidently a girl of a great personal force, but she lacked pliancy.  She was hemming a kitchen towel with the aid of a large steel thimble.  She bent her serious eyes at last on her work again, and let Rowland explain himself.

“I have become suddenly so very intimate with your son,” he said at last, addressing himself to Mrs. Hudson, “that it seems just I should make your acquaintance.”

“Very just,” murmured the poor lady, and after a moment’s hesitation was on the point of adding something more; but Mr. Striker here interposed, after a prefatory clearance of the throat.

“I should like to take the liberty,” he said, “of addressing you a simple question.  For how long a period of time have you been acquainted with our young friend?” He continued to kick the air, but his head was thrown back and his eyes fixed on the opposite wall, as if in aversion to the spectacle of Rowland’s inevitable confusion.

“A very short time, I confess.  Hardly three days.”

“And yet you call yourself intimate, eh?  I have been seeing Mr. Roderick daily these three years, and yet it was only this morning that I felt as if I had at last the right to say that I knew him.  We had a few moments’ conversation in my office which supplied the missing links in the evidence.  So that now I do venture to say I ’m acquainted with Mr. Roderick!  But wait three years, sir, like me!” and Mr. Striker laughed, with a closed mouth and a noiseless shake of all his long person.

Mrs. Hudson smiled confusedly, at hazard; Miss Garland kept her eyes on her stitches.  But it seemed to Rowland that the latter colored a little.  “Oh, in three years, of course,” he said, “we shall know each other better.  Before many years are over, madam,” he pursued, “I expect the world to know him.  I expect him to be a great man!”

Mrs. Hudson looked at first as if this could be but an insidious device for increasing her distress by the assistance of irony.  Then reassured, little by little, by Rowland’s benevolent visage, she gave him an appealing glance and a timorous “Really?”

But before Rowland could respond, Mr. Striker again intervened.  “Do I fully apprehend your expression?” he asked.  “Our young friend is to become a great man?”

“A great artist, I hope,” said Rowland.

“This is a new and interesting view,” said Mr. Striker, with an assumption of judicial calmness.  “We have had hopes for Mr. Roderick, but I confess, if I have rightly understood them, they stopped short of greatness.  We should n’t have taken the responsibility of claiming it for him.  What do you say, ladies?  We all feel about him here—­his mother, Miss Garland, and myself—­as if his