which always had an accent of scrupulous, of almost studied, consideration.  An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age—­possibly an affectionate maiden aunt—­who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated:  perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars.  Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded.  He had wondered over the whole matter, first and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all possible lights.  There was something terribly hard to explain in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin.  She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was particularly so in this one.  Just why it was that Roderick should not logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated comparison between himself and the accepted suitor.  Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic passion.  That if he chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick’s mistress, the irregularity here was hardly Roderick’s, was a view of the case to which poor Rowland did scanty justice.  There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one’s business to fall in love with a little—­women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating.  Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the divine tremor, of a lover.  There were other women—­they might have great beauty, they might have small; perhaps they were generally to be classified as plain—­whose triumphs in this line were rare, but immutably permanent.  Such a one preeminently, was Mary Garland.  Upon the doctrine of probabilities, it was unlikely that she had had an equal charm for each of them, and was it not possible, therefore, that the charm for Roderick had been simply the charm imagined, unquestioningly accepted:  the general charm of youth, sympathy, kindness—­of the present feminine, in short—­enhanced indeed by several fine facial traits?  The charm in this case for Rowland was—­the charm!—­the mysterious, individual, essential woman.  There was an element in the charm, as his companion saw it, which Rowland was obliged to recognize, but which he forbore to ponder; the rather important attraction, namely, of reciprocity.  As to Miss Garland being in love with Roderick and becoming charming thereby, this was a point with which his imagination ventured