“He ’s very lovable, sir, I assure you.  When you come to know him you ’ll find him very lovable.  He ’s a little spoiled, of course; he has always done with me as he pleased; but he ’s a good boy, I ’m sure he ’s a good boy.  And every one thinks him very attractive:  I ’m sure he ’d be noticed, anywhere.  Don’t you think he ’s very handsome, sir?  He features his poor father.  I had another—­perhaps you ’ve been told.  He was killed.”  And the poor little lady bravely smiled, for fear of doing worse.  “He was a very fine boy, but very different from Roderick.  Roderick is a little strange; he has never been an easy boy.  Sometimes I feel like the goose—­was n’t it a goose, dear?” and startled by the audacity of her comparison she appealed to Miss Garland—­“the goose, or the hen, who hatched a swan’s egg.  I have never been able to give him what he needs.  I have always thought that in more—­in more brilliant circumstances he might find his place and be happy.  But at the same time I was afraid of the world for him; it was so large and dangerous and dreadful.  No doubt I know very little about it.  I never suspected, I confess, that it contained persons of such liberality as yours.”

Rowland replied that, evidently, she had done the world but scanty justice.  “No,” objected Miss Garland, after a pause, “it is like something in a fairy tale.”

“What, pray?”

“Your coming here all unknown, so rich and so polite, and carrying off my cousin in a golden cloud.”

If this was badinage Miss Garland had the best of it, for Rowland almost fell a-musing silently over the question whether there was a possibility of irony in that transparent gaze.  Before he withdrew, Mrs. Hudson made him tell her again that Roderick’s powers were extraordinary.  He had inspired her with a clinging, caressing faith in his wisdom.  “He will really do great things,” she asked, “the very greatest?”

“I see no reason in his talent itself why he should not.”

“Well, we ’ll think of that as we sit here alone,” she rejoined.  “Mary and I will sit here and talk about it.  So I give him up,” she went on, as he was going.  “I ’m sure you ’ll be the best of friends to him, but if you should ever forget him, or grow tired of him, or lose your interest in him, and he should come to any harm or any trouble, please, sir, remember”—­And she paused, with a tremulous voice.

“Remember, my dear madam?”

“That he is all I have—­that he is everything—­and that it would be very terrible.”

“In so far as I can help him, he shall succeed,” was all Rowland could say.  He turned to Miss Garland, to bid her good night, and she rose and put out her hand.  She was very straightforward, but he could see that if she was too modest to be bold, she was much too simple to be shy.  “Have you no charge to lay upon me?” he asked—­to ask her something.

She looked at him a moment and then, although she was not shy, she blushed.  “Make him do his best,” she said.