Rowland stared, then strolled away, softly whistling to himself.  He was unwilling to admit even to himself that this speech had really the sinister meaning it seemed to have.  In a few days the two young men made their way back to Italy, and lingered a while in Florence before going on to Rome.  In Florence Roderick seemed to have won back his old innocence and his preference for the pleasures of study over any others.  Rowland began to think of the Baden episode as a bad dream, or at the worst as a mere sporadic piece of disorder, without roots in his companion’s character.  They passed a fortnight looking at pictures and exploring for out the way bits of fresco and carving, and Roderick recovered all his earlier fervor of appreciation and comment.  In Rome he went eagerly to work again, and finished in a month two or three small things he had left standing on his departure.  He talked the most joyous nonsense about finding himself back in his old quarters.  On the first Sunday afternoon following their return, on their going together to Saint Peter’s, he delivered himself of a lyrical greeting to the great church and to the city in general, in a tone of voice so irrepressibly elevated that it rang through the nave in rather a scandalous fashion, and almost arrested a procession of canons who were marching across to the choir.  He began to model a new statue—­a female figure, of which he had said nothing to Rowland.  It represented a woman, leaning lazily back in her chair, with her head drooping as if she were listening, a vague smile on her lips, and a pair of remarkably beautiful arms folded in her lap.  With rather less softness of contour, it would have resembled the noble statue of Agrippina in the Capitol.  Rowland looked at it and was not sure he liked it.  “Who is it? what does it mean?” he asked.

“Anything you please!” said Roderick, with a certain petulance.  “I call it A Reminiscence.”

Rowland then remembered that one of the Baden ladies had been “statuesque,” and asked no more questions.  This, after all, was a way of profiting by experience.  A few days later he took his first ride of the season on the Campagna, and as, on his homeward way, he was passing across the long shadow of a ruined tower, he perceived a small figure at a short distance, bent over a sketch-book.  As he drew near, he recognized his friend Singleton.  The honest little painter’s face was scorched to flame-color by the light of southern suns, and borrowed an even deeper crimson from his gleeful greeting of his most appreciative patron.  He was making a careful and charming little sketch.  On Rowland’s asking him how he had spent his summer, he gave an account of his wanderings which made poor Mallet sigh with a sense of more contrasts than one.  He had not been out of Italy, but he had been delving deep into the picturesque heart of the lovely land, and gathering a wonderful store of subjects.  He had rambled about among the unvisited villages of the