pictures.  These represented generally a bunch of dew-sprinkled roses, with the dew-drops very highly finished, or else a wayside shrine, and a peasant woman, with her back turned, kneeling before it.  She did backs very well, but she was a little weak in faces.  Flowers, however, were her speciality, and though her touch was a little old-fashioned and finical, she painted them with remarkable skill.  Her pictures were chiefly bought by the English.  Rowland had made her acquaintance early in the winter, and as she kept a saddle horse and rode a great deal, he had asked permission to be her cavalier.  In this way they had become almost intimate.  Miss Blanchard’s name was Augusta; she was slender, pale, and elegant looking; she had a very pretty head and brilliant auburn hair, which she braided with classical simplicity.  She talked in a sweet, soft voice, used language at times a trifle superfine, and made literary allusions.  These had often a patriotic strain, and Rowland had more than once been irritated by her quotations from Mrs. Sigourney in the cork-woods of Monte Mario, and from Mr. Willis among the ruins of Veii.  Rowland was of a dozen different minds about her, and was half surprised, at times, to find himself treating it as a matter of serious moment whether he liked her or not.  He admired her, and indeed there was something admirable in her combination of beauty and talent, of isolation and tranquil self-support.  He used sometimes to go into the little, high-niched, ordinary room which served her as a studio, and find her working at a panel six inches square, at an open casement, profiled against the deep blue Roman sky.  She received him with a meek-eyed dignity that made her seem like a painted saint on a church window, receiving the daylight in all her being.  The breath of reproach passed her by with folded wings.  And yet Rowland wondered why he did not like her better.  If he failed, the reason was not far to seek.  There was another woman whom he liked better, an image in his heart which refused to yield precedence.

On that evening to which allusion has been made, when Rowland was left alone between the starlight and the waves with the sudden knowledge that Mary Garland was to become another man’s wife, he had made, after a while, the simple resolution to forget her.  And every day since, like a famous philosopher who wished to abbreviate his mourning for a faithful servant, he had said to himself in substance—­“Remember to forget Mary Garland.”  Sometimes it seemed as if he were succeeding; then, suddenly, when he was least expecting it, he would find her name, inaudibly, on his lips, and seem to see her eyes meeting his eyes.  All this made him uncomfortable, and seemed to portend a possible discord.  Discord was not to his taste; he shrank from imperious passions, and the idea of finding himself jealous of an unsuspecting friend was absolutely repulsive.  More than ever, then, the path of duty was to forget Mary Garland,