Cecilia’s blooming garden and shady porch had seemed so friendly to repose and a cigar, that she reproached him the next morning with indifference to her little parlor, not less, in its way, a monument to her ingenious taste.  “And by the way,” she added as he followed her in, “if I refused last night to show you a pretty girl, I can at least show you a pretty boy.”

She threw open a window and pointed to a statuette which occupied the place of honor among the ornaments of the room.  Rowland looked at it a moment and then turned to her with an exclamation of surprise.  She gave him a rapid glance, perceived that her statuette was of altogether exceptional merit, and then smiled, knowingly, as if this had long been an agreeable certainty.

“Who did it? where did you get it?” Rowland demanded.

“Oh,” said Cecilia, adjusting the light, “it ’s a little thing of Mr. Hudson’s.”

“And who the deuce is Mr. Hudson?” asked Rowland.  But he was absorbed; he lost her immediate reply.  The statuette, in bronze, something less than two feet high, represented a naked youth drinking from a gourd.  The attitude was perfectly simple.  The lad was squarely planted on his feet, with his legs a little apart; his back was slightly hollowed, his head thrown back, and both hands raised to support the rustic cup.  There was a loosened fillet of wild flowers about his head, and his eyes, under their drooped lids, looked straight into the cup.  On the base was scratched the Greek word ;aa;gD;gi;gc;ga, Thirst.  The figure might have been some beautiful youth of ancient fable,—­Hylas or Narcissus, Paris or Endymion.  Its beauty was the beauty of natural movement; nothing had been sought to be represented but the perfection of an attitude.  This had been most attentively studied, and it was exquisitely rendered.  Rowland demanded more light, dropped his head on this side and that, uttered vague exclamations.  He said to himself, as he had said more than once in the Louvre and the Vatican, “We ugly mortals, what beautiful creatures we are!” Nothing, in a long time, had given him so much pleasure.  “Hudson—­Hudson,” he asked again; “who is Hudson?”

“A young man of this place,” said Cecilia.

“A young man?  How old?”

“I suppose he is three or four and twenty.”

“Of this place, you say—­of Northampton, Massachusetts?”

“He lives here, but he comes from Virginia.”

“Is he a sculptor by profession?”

“He ’s a law-student.”

Rowland burst out laughing.  “He has found something in Blackstone that I never did.  He makes statues then simply for his pleasure?”

Cecilia, with a smile, gave a little toss of her head.  “For mine!”

“I congratulate you,” said Rowland.  “I wonder whether he could be induced to do anything for me?”

“This was a matter of friendship.  I saw the figure when he had modeled it in clay, and of course greatly admired it.  He said nothing at the time, but a week ago, on my birthday, he arrived in a buggy, with this.  He had had it cast at the foundry at Chicopee; I believe it ’s a beautiful piece of bronze.  He begged me to accept.”