I will do as I 'm told, but I don't
call that doing. We must leave Rome, I suppose, though I don't see why.
We have got no money, and you have to pay money on the railroads."

Mrs. Hudson surreptitiously wrung her hands. "Listen to him, please!"
she cried. "Not leave Rome, when we have staid here later than any
Christians ever did before! It 's this dreadful place that has made us
so unhappy."

"That 's very true," said Roderick, serenely. "If I had not come to
Rome, I would n't have risen, and if I had not risen, I should n't have
fallen."

"Fallen--fallen!" murmured Mrs. Hudson. "Just hear him!"

"I will do anything you say, Rowland," Roderick added. "I will do
anything you want. I have not been unkind to my mother--have I, mother?
I was unkind yesterday, without meaning it; for after all, all that had
to be said. Murder will out, and my low spirits can't be hidden. But we
talked it over and made it up, did n't we? It seemed to me we did.
Let Rowland decide it, mother; whatever he suggests will be the right
thing." And Roderick, who had hardly removed his eyes from the statues,
got up again and went back to look at them.

Mrs. Hudson fixed her eyes upon the floor in silence. There was not
a trace in Roderick's face, or in his voice, of the bitterness of his
emotion of the day before, and not a hint of his having the lightest
weight upon his conscience. He looked at Rowland with his frank,
luminous eye as if there had never been a difference of opinion between
them; as if each had ever been for both, unalterably, and both for each.

Rowland had received a few days before a letter from a lady of his
acquaintance, a worthy Scotswoman domiciled in a villa upon one of the
olive-covered hills near Florence. She held her apartment in the villa
upon a long lease, and she enjoyed for a sum not worth mentioning the
possession of an extraordinary number of noble, stone-floored rooms,
with ceilings vaulted and frescoed, and barred windows commanding the
loveliest view in the world. She was a needy and thrifty spinster, who
never hesitated to declare that the lovely view was all very well, but
that for her own part she lived in the villa for cheapness, and that
if she had a clear three hundred pounds a year she would go and really
enjoy life near her sister, a baronet's lady, at Glasgow. She was now
proposing to make a visit to that exhilarating city, and she desired to
turn an honest penny by sub-letting for a few weeks her