you refuse to leave Rome?"

"Never!" said Roderick.

"The only chance that I see, then, of your reviving your sense of
responsibility to--to those various sacred things you have forgotten, is
in sending for your mother to join you here."

Roderick stared. "For my mother?"

"For your mother--and for Miss Garland."

Roderick still stared; and then, slowly and faintly, his face flushed.
"For Mary Garland--for my mother?" he repeated. "Send for them?"

"Tell me this; I have often wondered, but till now I have forborne to
ask. You are still engaged to Miss Garland?"

Roderick frowned darkly, but assented.

"It would give you pleasure, then, to see her?"

Roderick turned away and for some moments answered nothing. "Pleasure!"
he said at last, huskily. "Call it pain."

"I regard you as a sick man," Rowland continued. "In such a case Miss
Garland would say that her place was at your side."

Roderick looked at him some time askance, mistrustfully. "Is this a
deep-laid snare?" he asked slowly.

Rowland had come back with all his patience rekindled, but these words
gave it an almost fatal chill. "Heaven forgive you!" he cried bitterly.
"My idea has been simply this. Try, in decency, to understand it. I have
tried to befriend you, to help you, to inspire you with confidence,
and I have failed. I took you from the hands of your mother and your
betrothed, and it seemed to me my duty to restore you to their hands.
That 's all I have to say."

He was going, but Roderick forcibly detained him. It would have been
but a rough way of expressing it to say that one could never know how
Roderick would take a thing. It had happened more than once that when
hit hard, deservedly, he had received the blow with touching gentleness.
On the other hand, he had often resented the softest taps. The secondary
effect of Rowland's present admonition seemed reassuring. "I beg you to
wait," he said, "to forgive that shabby speech, and to let me reflect."
And he walked up and down awhile, reflecting. At last he stopped, with
a look in his face that Rowland had not seen all winter. It was a
strikingly beautiful look.

"How strange it is," he said, "that the simplest devices are the last
that occur to one!" And he broke into a light laugh. "To see Mary
Garland is just what I want. And my mother--my mother can't hurt me
now."

"You will write, then?"

"I will telegraph. They must come, at whatever cost. Striker can arrange
it all for them."