ny long walks, and, thanks to the lucid mountain air, not a
little exhilaration. Mrs. Hudson was obliged to intermit her suspicions
of the deleterious atmosphere of the old world, and to acknowledge the
edifying purity of the breezes of Engelthal. She was certainly more
placid than she had been in Italy; having always lived in the country,
she had missed in Rome and Florence that social solitude mitigated by
bushes and rocks which is so dear to the true New England temperament.
The little unpainted inn at Engelthal, with its plank partitions, its
milk-pans standing in the sun, its "help," in the form of angular young
women of the country-side, reminded her of places of summer sojourn
in her native land; and the beautiful historic chambers of the Villa
Pandolfini passed from her memory without a regret, and without having
in the least modified her ideal of domiciliary grace. Roderick had
changed his sky, but he had not changed his mind; his humor was still
that of which he had given Rowland a glimpse in that tragic explosion on
the Lake of Como. He kept his despair to himself, and he went doggedly
about the ordinary business of life; but it was easy to see that his
spirit was mortally heavy, and that he lived and moved and talked simply
from the force of habit. In that sad half-hour among the Italian olives
there had been such a fierce sincerity in his tone, that Rowland
began to abdicate the critical attitude. He began to feel that it was
essentially vain to appeal to the poor fellow's will; there was no will
left; its place was an impotent void. This view of the case indeed was
occasionally contravened by certain indications on Roderick's part of
the power of resistance to disagreeable obligations: one might still
have said, if one had been disposed to be didactic at any hazard,
that there was a method in his madness, that his moral energy had its
sleeping and its waking hours, and that, in a cause that pleased it, it
was capable of rising with the dawn. But on the other hand, pleasure, in
this case, was quite at one with effort; evidently the greatest bliss in
life, for Roderick, would have been to have a plastic idea. And then, it
was impossible not to feel tenderly to a despair which had so ceased to
be aggressive--not to forgive a great deal of apathy to a temper
which had so unlearned its irritability. Roderick said frankly that
Switzerland made him less miserable than Italy, and the Alps seemed less
to mock at his