Yours most respectfully,

Mary Garland.

It is a question whether the reader will know why, but this letter gave Rowland extraordinary pleasure.  He liked its very brevity and meagreness, and there seemed to him an exquisite modesty in its saying nothing from the young girl herself.  He delighted in the formal address and conclusion; they pleased him as he had been pleased by an angular gesture in some expressive girlish figure in an early painting.  The letter renewed that impression of strong feeling combined with an almost rigid simplicity, which Roderick’s betrothed had personally given him.  And its homely stiffness seemed a vivid reflection of a life concentrated, as the young girl had borrowed warrant from her companion to say, in a single devoted idea.  The monotonous days of the two women seemed to Rowland’s fancy to follow each other like the tick-tick of a great time-piece, marking off the hours which separated them from the supreme felicity of clasping the far-away son and lover to lips sealed with the excess of joy.  He hoped that Roderick, now that he had shaken off the oppression of his own importunate faith, was not losing a tolerant temper for the silent prayers of the two women at Northampton.

He was left to vain conjectures, however, as to Roderick’s actual moods and occupations.  He knew he was no letter-writer, and that, in the young sculptor’s own phrase, he had at any time rather build a monument than write a note.  But when a month had passed without news of him, he began to be half anxious and half angry, and wrote him three lines, in the care of a Continental banker, begging him at least to give some sign of whether he was alive or dead.  A week afterwards came an answer—­brief, and dated Baden-Baden.  “I know I have been a great brute,” Roderick wrote, “not to have sent you a word before; but really I don’t know what has got into me.  I have lately learned terribly well how to be idle.  I am afraid to think how long it is since I wrote to my mother or to Mary.  Heaven help them—­poor, patient, trustful creatures!  I don’t know how to tell you what I am doing.  It seems all amusing enough while I do it, but it would make a poor show in a narrative intended for your formidable eyes.  I found Baxter in Switzerland, or rather he found me, and he grabbed me by the arm and brought me here.  I was walking twenty miles a day in the Alps, drinking milk in lonely chalets, sleeping as you sleep, and thinking it was all very good fun; but Baxter told me it would never do, that the Alps were ‘d——­d rot,’ that Baden-Baden was the place, and that if I knew what was good for me I would come along with him.  It is a wonderful place, certainly, though, thank the Lord, Baxter departed last week, blaspheming horribly at trente et quarante.  But you know all about it and what one does—­what one is liable to do.  I have succumbed, in a measure, to the liabilities, and I wish I had some one here to give me a thundering good blowing up.  Not