It had been a very just remark of Cecilia’s that Roderick would change with a change in his circumstances.  Rowland had telegraphed to New York for another berth on his steamer, and from the hour the answer came Hudson’s spirits rose to incalculable heights.  He was radiant with good-humor, and his kindly jollity seemed the pledge of a brilliant future.  He had forgiven his old enemies and forgotten his old grievances, and seemed every way reconciled to a world in which he was going to count as an active force.  He was inexhaustibly loquacious and fantastic, and as Cecilia said, he had suddenly become so good that it was only to be feared he was going to start not for Europe but for heaven.  He took long walks with Rowland, who felt more and more the fascination of what he would have called his giftedness.  Rowland returned several times to Mrs. Hudson’s, and found the two ladies doing their best to be happy in their companion’s happiness.  Miss Garland, he thought, was succeeding better than her demeanor on his first visit had promised.  He tried to have some especial talk with her, but her extreme reserve forced him to content himself with such response to his rather urgent overtures as might be extracted from a keenly attentive smile.  It must be confessed, however, that if the response was vague, the satisfaction was great, and that Rowland, after his second visit, kept seeing a lurking reflection of this smile in the most unexpected places.  It seemed strange that she should please him so well at so slender a cost, but please him she did, prodigiously, and his pleasure had a quality altogether new to him.  It made him restless, and a trifle melancholy; he walked about absently, wondering and wishing.  He wondered, among other things, why fate should have condemned him to make the acquaintance of a girl whom he would make a sacrifice to know better, just as he was leaving the country for years.  It seemed to him that he was turning his back on a chance of happiness—­happiness of a sort of which the slenderest germ should be cultivated.  He asked himself whether, feeling as he did, if he had only himself to please, he would give up his journey and—­wait.  He had Roderick to please now, for whom disappointment would be cruel; but he said to himself that certainly, if there were no Roderick in the case, the ship should sail without him.  He asked Hudson several questions about his cousin, but Roderick, confidential on most points, seemed to have reasons of his own for being reticent on this one.  His measured answers quickened Rowland’s curiosity, for Miss Garland, with her own irritating half-suggestions, had only to be a subject of guarded allusion in others to become intolerably interesting.  He learned from Roderick that she was the daughter of a country minister, a far-away cousin of his mother, settled in another part of the State; that she was one of a half-a-dozen daughters, that the family was very poor, and that she had come a couple of months before to pay his mother a long visit.  “It is to be a very long one now,” he said, “for it is settled that she is to remain while I am away.”