s would have counted for little.
They made their way to the softest spot in his conscience and kept it
chronically aching. If Mrs. Hudson had been loquacious and vulgar, he
would have borne even a less valid persecution with greater fortitude.
But somehow, neat and noiseless and dismally lady-like, as she sat
there, keeping her grievance green with her soft-dropping tears, her
displeasure conveyed an overwhelming imputation of brutality. He felt
like a reckless trustee who has speculated with the widow's mite, and is
haunted with the reflection of ruin that he sees in her tearful eyes. He
did everything conceivable to be polite to Mrs. Hudson, and to treat her
with distinguished deference. Perhaps his exasperated nerves made him
overshoot the mark, and rendered his civilities a trifle peremptory. She
seemed capable of believing that he was trying to make a fool of her;
she would have thought him cruelly recreant if he had suddenly
departed in desperation, and yet she gave him no visible credit for his
constancy. Women are said by some authorities to be cruel; I don't know
how true this is, but it may at least be pertinent to remark that Mrs.
Hudson was very much of a woman. It often seemed to Rowland that he
had too decidedly forfeited his freedom, and that there was something
positively grotesque in a man of his age and circumstances living in
such a moral bondage.

But Mary Garland had helped him before, and she helped him now--helped
him not less than he had assured himself she would when he found himself
drifting to Florence. Yet her help was rendered in the same unconscious,
unacknowledged fashion as before; there was no explicit change in their
relations. After that distressing scene in Rome which had immediately
preceded their departure, it was of course impossible that there should
not be on Miss Garland's part some frankness of allusion to Roderick's
sad condition. She had been present, the reader will remember, during
only half of his unsparing confession, and Rowland had not seen her
confronted with any absolute proof of Roderick's passion for Christina
Light. But he knew that she knew far too much for her happiness;
Roderick had told him, shortly after their settlement at the Villa
Pandolfini, that he had had a "tremendous talk" with his cousin. Rowland
asked no questions about it; he preferred not to know what had passed
between them. If their interview had been purely painful, he wished
to ignore it for Mi