Rowland noted the soft intensity with which the words were uttered.  “Do you take a great interest in him?” he demanded.

“Certainly.”

“Then, if he will not do his best for you, he will not do it for me.”  She turned away with another blush, and Rowland took his leave.

He walked homeward, thinking of many things.  The great Northampton elms interarched far above in the darkness, but the moon had risen and through scattered apertures was hanging the dusky vault with silver lamps.  There seemed to Rowland something intensely serious in the scene in which he had just taken part.  He had laughed and talked and braved it out in self-defense; but when he reflected that he was really meddling with the simple stillness of this little New England home, and that he had ventured to disturb so much living security in the interest of a far-away, fantastic hypothesis, he paused, amazed at his temerity.  It was true, as Cecilia had said, that for an unofficious man it was a singular position.  There stirred in his mind an odd feeling of annoyance with Roderick for having thus peremptorily enlisted his sympathies.  As he looked up and down the long vista, and saw the clear white houses glancing here and there in the broken moonshine, he could almost have believed that the happiest lot for any man was to make the most of life in some such tranquil spot as that.  Here were kindness, comfort, safety, the warning voice of duty, the perfect hush of temptation.  And as Rowland looked along the arch of silvered shadow and out into the lucid air of the American night, which seemed so doubly vast, somehow, and strange and nocturnal, he felt like declaring that here was beauty too—­beauty sufficient for an artist not to starve upon it.  As he stood, lost in the darkness, he presently heard a rapid tread on the other side of the road, accompanied by a loud, jubilant whistle, and in a moment a figure emerged into an open gap of moonshine.  He had no difficulty in recognizing Hudson, who was presumably returning from a visit to Cecilia.  Roderick stopped suddenly and stared up at the moon, with his face vividly illumined.  He broke out into a snatch of song:—­

“The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story!”

And with a great, musical roll of his voice he went swinging off into the darkness again, as if his thoughts had lent him wings.  He was dreaming of the inspiration of foreign lands,—­of castled crags and historic landscapes.  What a pity, after all, thought Rowland, as he went his own way, that he should n’t have a taste of it!