g spar. Rowland greatly pitied her, for there
is something respectable in passionate grief, even in a very bad cause;
and as pity is akin to love, he endured her rather better than he had
done hitherto.

"Speak to her, plead with her, command her!" she cried, pressing and
shaking his hands. "She 'll not heed us, no more than if we were a pair
of clocks a-ticking. Perhaps she will listen to you; she always liked
you."

"She always disliked me," said Rowland. "But that does n't matter now.
I have come here simply because you sent for me, not because I can help
you. I cannot advise your daughter."

"Oh, cruel, deadly man! You must advise her; you shan't leave this house
till you have advised her!" the poor woman passionately retorted. "Look
at me in my misery and refuse to help me! Oh, you need n't be afraid, I
know I 'm a fright, I have n't an idea what I have on. If this goes
on, we may both as well turn scarecrows. If ever a woman was desperate,
frantic, heart-broken, I am that woman. I can't begin to tell you. To
have nourished a serpent, sir, all these years! to have lavished one's
self upon a viper that turns and stings her own poor mother! To have
toiled and prayed, to have pushed and struggled, to have eaten the bread
of bitterness, and all the rest of it, sir--and at the end of all things
to find myself at this pass. It can't be, it 's too cruel, such things
don't happen, the Lord don't allow it. I 'm a religious woman, sir,
and the Lord knows all about me. With his own hand he had given me his
reward! I would have lain down in the dust and let her walk over me; I
would have given her the eyes out of my head, if she had taken a fancy
to them. No, she 's a cruel, wicked, heartless, unnatural girl! I speak
to you, Mr. Mallet, in my dire distress, as to my only friend. There is
n't a creature here that I can look to--not one of them all that I have
faith in. But I always admired you. I said to Christina the first time I
saw you that there at last was a real gentleman. Come, don't disappoint
me now! I feel so terribly alone, you see; I feel what a nasty, hard,
heartless world it is that has come and devoured my dinners and danced
to my fiddles, and yet that has n't a word to throw to me in my agony!
Oh, the money, alone, that I have put into this thing, would melt the
heart of a Turk!"

During this frenzied outbreak Rowland had had time to look round the
room, and to see the Cavaliere sitting in a corner, like a m