ollected his wits. The next moment, with a ringing,
jovial cry, he was folding the young girl in his arms, and the next
he was beside his mother's carriage, half smothered in her sobs and
caresses. Rowland had recommended a hotel close at hand, and had then
discreetly withdrawn. Roderick was at this time doing his part superbly,
and Miss Garland's brow was serene. It was serene now, twenty-four hours
later; but nevertheless, her alarm had lasted an appreciable moment.
What had become of it? It had dropped down deep into her memory, and
it was lying there for the present in the shade. But with another
week, Rowland said to himself, it would leap erect again; the lightest
friction would strike a spark from it. Rowland thought he had schooled
himself to face the issue of Mary Garland's advent, casting it even in
a tragical phase; but in her personal presence--in which he found a
poignant mixture of the familiar and the strange--he seemed to face
it and all that it might bring with it for the first time. In vulgar
parlance, he stood uneasy in his shoes. He felt like walking on tiptoe,
not to arouse the sleeping shadows. He felt, indeed, almost like saying
that they might have their own way later, if they would only allow
to these first few days the clear light of ardent contemplation. For
Rowland at last was ardent, and all the bells within his soul were
ringing bravely in jubilee. Roderick, he learned, had been the whole
day with his mother, and had evidently responded to her purest trust.
He appeared to her appealing eyes still unspotted by the world. That
is what it is, thought Rowland, to be "gifted," to escape not only the
superficial, but the intrinsic penalties of misconduct. The two ladies
had spent the day within doors, resting from the fatigues of travel.
Miss Garland, Rowland suspected, was not so fatigued as she suffered
it to be assumed. She had remained with Mrs. Hudson, to attend to her
personal wants, which the latter seemed to think, now that she was in
a foreign land, with a southern climate and a Catholic religion, would
forthwith become very complex and formidable, though as yet they had
simply resolved themselves into a desire for a great deal of tea and for
a certain extremely familiar old black and white shawl across her feet,
as she lay on the sofa. But the sense of novelty was evidently strong
upon Miss Garland, and the light of expectation was in her eye. She was
restless and excited; she moved about