"You think I 'm an impudent humbug," the latter said at last, "coming up to moralize at this hour of the night. You think I want to throw dust into your eyes, to put you off the scent. That 's your eminently rational view of the case."

  "Excuse me from taking any view at all," said Rowland.

  "You have given me up, then?"

  "No, I have merely suspended judgment. I am waiting."

  "You have ceased then positively to believe in me?"

  Rowland made an angry gesture. "Oh, cruel boy! When you have hit your mark and made people care for you, you should n't twist your weapon about at that rate in their vitals. Allow me to say I am sleepy. Good night!"

  Some days afterward it happened that Rowland, on a long afternoon ramble, took his way through one of the quiet corners of the Trastevere. He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted with a crushing past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had had their day. When the yellow afternoon sunshine slept on the sallow, battered walls, and lengthened the shadows in the grassy courtyards of small closed churches, the place acquired a strange fascination. The church of Saint Cecilia has one of these sunny, waste-looking courts; the edifice seems abandoned to silence and the charity of chance devotion. Rowland never passed it without going in, and he was generally the only visitor. He entered it now, but found that two persons had preceded him. Both were women. One was at her prayers at one of the side altars; the other was seated against a column at the upper end of the nave. Rowland walked to the altar, and paid, in a momentary glance at the clever statue of the saint in death, in the niche beneath it, the usual tribute to the charm of polished ingenuity. As he turned away he looked at the person seated and recognized Christina Light. Seeing that she perceived him, he advanced to speak to her.

  She was sitting in a listless attitude, with her hands in her lap; she seemed to be tired. She was dressed simply, as if for walking and escaping observation. When he had greeted her he glanced back at her companion, and recognized the faithful Assunta.

  Christina smiled. "Are you looking for Mr. Hudson? He is not here, I am happy to say."

  "But you?" he asked. "This is a strange place to find you."

  "Not at all! People call me a strange girl, and I might as well have the comfort of it. I came to take a walk; that, by the way, is part of my strangeness. I can't loll all the morning on a sofa, and all the afternoon in a carriage. I get horribly restless. I must move; I must do something and see something. Mamma suggests a cup of tea. Meanwhile I put on an old dress and half a dozen veils, I take Assunta under my arm, and we start on a pedestrian tour. It 's a bore that I can't take the poodle, but he attracts attention. We trudge about everywhere; there is nothing I like so much. I hope you will congratulate me on the simplicity of my tastes."

  "I congratulate you on your wisdom. To live in Rome and not to walk would, I think, be poor pleasure. But you are terribly far from home, and I am afraid you are tired."

  "A little—enough to sit here a while."

  "Might I offer you my company while you rest?"

  "If you will promise to amuse me. I am in dismal spirits."

  Rowland said he would do what he could, and brought a chair and placed it near her. He was not in love with her; he disapproved of her; he mistrusted her; and yet he felt it a kind of privilege to watch her, and he found a peculiar excitement in talking to her. The background of her nature, as he would have called it, was large and mysterious, and it emitted strange, fantastic gleams and flashes. Watching for these rather quickened one's pulses. Moreover, it was not a disadvantage to talk to a girl who made one keep guard on one's composure; it diminished one's chronic liability to utter something less than revised wisdom.

  Assunta had risen from her prayers, and, as he took his place, was coming back to her mistress. But Christina motioned her away. "No, no; while you are about it, say a few dozen more!" she said. "Pray for me," she added in English. "Pray, I say nothing silly. She has been at it half an hour; I envy her capacity!"

  "Have you never felt in any degree," Rowland asked, "the fascination of Catholicism?"

  "Yes, I have been through that, too! There was a time when I wanted immensely to be a nun; it was not a laughing matter. It was when I was about sixteen years old. I read the Imitation and the Life of Saint Catherine. I fully believed in the miracles of the saints, and I was dying to have one of my own. The least little accident that could have been twisted into a miracle would have carried me straight into the bosom of the church. I had the real religious passion. It has passed away, and, as I sat here just now, I was wondering what had become of it!"

  Rowland had already been sensible of something in this young lady's tone which he would have called a want of veracity, and this epitome of her religious experience failed to strike him as an absolute statement of fact. But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed in her talk were not so much perversions, as sympathetic exaggerations, of fact. And Rowland felt that whatever she said of herself might have been, under the imagined circumstances; impulse was there, audacity, the restless, questioning temperament. "I am afraid I am sadly prosaic," he said, "for in these many months now that I have been in Rome, I have never ceased for a moment to look at Catholicism simply from the outside. I don't see an opening as big as your finger-nail where I could creep into it!"

  "What do you believe?" asked Christina, looking at him. "Are you religious?"

  "I believe in God."

  Christina let her beautiful eyes wander a while, and then gave a little sigh. "You are much to be envied!"

  "You, I imagine, in that line have nothing to envy me."

  "Yes, I have. Rest!"

  "You are too young to say that."

  "I am not young; I have never been young! My mother took care of that. I was a little wrinkled old woman at ten."

  "I am afraid," said Rowland, in a moment, "that you are fond of painting yourself in dark colors."

  She looked at him a while in silence. "Do you wish," she demanded at last, "to win my eternal gratitude? Prove to me that I am better than I suppose."

  "I should have first to know what you really suppose."

  She shook her head. "It would n't do. You would be horrified to learn even the things I imagine about myself, and shocked at the knowledge of evil displayed in my very mistakes."

  "Well, then," said Rowland, "I will ask no questions. But, at a venture, I promise you to catch you some day in the act of doing something very good."

  "Can it be, can it be," she asked, "that you too are trying to flatter me? I thought you and I had fallen, from the first, into rather a truth-speaking vein."

  "Oh, I have not abandoned it!" said Rowland; and he determined, since he had the credit of homely directness, to push his advantage farther. The opportunity seemed excellent. But while he was hesitating as to just how to begin, the young girl said, bending forward and clasping her hands in her lap, "Please tell me about your religion."

  "Tell you about it? I can't!" said Rowland, with a good deal of emphasis.

  She flushed a little. "Is it such a mighty mystery it cannot be put into words, nor communicated to my base ears?"

  "It is simply a sentiment that makes part of my life, and I can't detach myself from it sufficiently to talk about it."

  "Religion, it seems to me, should be eloquent and aggressive. It should wish to make converts, to persuade and illumine, to sway all hearts!"

  "One's religion takes the color of one's general disposition. I am not aggressive, and certainly I am not eloquent."

  "Beware, then, of finding yourself confronted with doubt and despair! I am sure that doubt, at times, and the bitterness that comes of it, can be terribly eloquent. To tell the truth, my lonely musings, before you came in, were eloquent enough, in their way. What do you know of anything but this strange, terrible world that surrounds you? How do you know that your faith is not a mere crazy castle in the air; one of those castles that we are called fools for building when we lodge them in this life?"

  "I don't know it, any more than any one knows the contrary. But one's religion is extremely ingenious in doing without knowledge."

  "In such a world as this it certainly needs to be!"

  Rowland smiled. "What is your particular quarrel with this world?"

  "It 's a general quarrel. Nothing is true, or fixed, or permanent. We all seem to be playing with shadows more or less grotesque. It all comes over me here so dismally! The very atmosphere of this cold, deserted church seems to mock at one's longing to believe in something. Who cares for it now? who comes to it? who takes it seriously? Poor stupid Assunta there gives in her adhesion in a jargon she does n't understand, and you and I, proper, passionless tourists, come lounging in to rest from a walk. And yet the Catholic church was once the proudest institution in the world, and had quite its own way with men's souls. When such a mighty structure as that turns out to have a flaw, what faith is one to put in one's poor little views and philosophies? What is right and what is wrong? What is one really to care for? What is the proper rule of life? I am tired of trying to discover, and I suspect it 's not worth the trouble. Live as most amuses you!"

  "Your perplexities are so terribly comprehensive," said Rowland, smiling, "that one hardly knows where to meet them first."

  "I don't care much for anything you can say, because it 's sure to be half-hearted. You are not in the least contented, yourself."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Oh, I am an observer!"

  "No one is absolutely contented, I suppose, but I assure you I complain of nothing."

  "So much the worse for your honesty. To begin with, you are in love."

  "You would not have me complain of that!"

  "And it does n't go well. There are grievous obstacles. So much I know! You need n't protest; I ask no questions. You will tell no one—me least of all. Why does one never see you?"

  "Why, if I came to see you," said Rowland, deliberating, "it would n't be, it could n't be, for a trivial reason—because I had not been in a month, because I was passing, because I admire you. It would be because I should have something very particular to say. I have not come, because I have been slow in making up my mind to say it."

  "You are simply cruel. Something particular, in this ocean of inanities? In common charity, speak!"

  "I doubt whether you will like it."

  "Oh, I hope to heaven it 's not a compliment!"

  "It may be called a compliment to your reasonableness. You perhaps remember that I gave you a hint of it the other day at Frascati."

  "Has it been hanging fire all this time? Explode! I promise not to stop my ears."

  "It relates to my friend Hudson." And Rowland paused. She was looking at him expectantly; her face gave no sign. "I am rather disturbed in mind about him. He seems to me at times to be in an unpromising way." He paused again, but Christina said nothing. "The case is simply this," he went on. "It was by my advice he renounced his career at home and embraced his present one. I made him burn his ships. I brought him to Rome, I launched him in the world, and I stand surety, in a measure, to—to his mother, for his prosperity. It is not such smooth sailing as it might be, and I am inclined to put up prayers for fair winds. If he is to succeed, he must work—quietly, devotedly. It is not news to you, I imagine, that Hudson is a great admirer of yours."

  Christina remained silent; she turned away her eyes with an air, not of confusion, but of deep deliberation. Surprising frankness had, as a general thing, struck Rowland as the key-note of her character, but she had more than once given him a suggestion of an unfathomable power of calculation, and her silence now had something which it is hardly extravagant to call portentous. He had of course asked himself how far it was questionable taste to inform an unprotected girl, for the needs of a cause, that another man admired her; the thing, superficially, had an uncomfortable analogy with the shrewdness that uses a cat's paw and lets it risk being singed. But he decided that even rigid discretion is not bound to take a young lady at more than her own valuation, and Christina presently reassured him as to the limits of her susceptibility. "Mr. Hudson is in love with me!" she said.

  Rowland flinched a trifle. Then—"Am I," he asked, "from this point of view of mine, to be glad or sorry?"

  "I don't understand you."

  "Why, is Hudson to be happy, or unhappy?"

  She hesitated a moment. "You wish him to be great in his profession? And for that you consider that he must be happy in his life?"

  "Decidedly. I don't say it 's a general rule, but I think it is a rule for him."

  "So that if he were very happy, he would become very great?"

  "He would at least do himself justice."

  "And by that you mean a great deal?"

  "A great deal."

  Christina sank back in her chair and rested her eyes on the cracked and polished slabs of the pavement. At last, looking up, "You have not forgotten, I suppose, that you told me he was engaged?"

  "By no means."

  "He is still engaged, then?"

  "To the best of my belief."

  "And yet you desire that, as you say, he should be made happy by something I can do for him?"

  "What I desire is this. That your great influence with him should be exerted for his good, that it should help him and not retard him. Understand me. You probably know that your lovers have rather a restless time of it. I can answer for two of them. You don't know your own mind very well, I imagine, and you like being admired, rather at the expense of the admirer. Since we are really being frank, I wonder whether I might not say the great word."

  "You need n't; I know it. I am a horrible coquette."

  "No, not a horrible one, since I am making an appeal to your generosity. I am pretty sure you cannot imagine yourself marrying my friend."

  "There 's nothing I cannot imagine! That is my trouble."

  Rowland's brow contracted impatiently. "I cannot imagine it, then!" he affirmed.

  Christina flushed faintly; then, very gently, "I am not so bad as you think," she said.

  "It is not a question of badness; it is a question of whether circumstances don't make the thing an extreme improbability."

  "Worse and worse. I can be bullied, then, or bribed!"

  "You are not so candid," said Rowland, "as you pretend to be. My feeling is this. Hudson, as I understand him, does not need, as an artist, the stimulus of strong emotion, of passion. He's better without it; he's emotional and passionate enough when he 's left to himself. The sooner passion is at rest, therefore, the sooner he will settle down to work, and the fewer emotions he has that are mere emotions and nothing more, the better for him. If you cared for him enough to marry him, I should have nothing to say; I would never venture to interfere. But I strongly suspect you don't, and therefore I would suggest, most respectfully, that you should let him alone."

  "And if I let him alone, as you say, all will be well with him for ever more?"

  "Not immediately and not absolutely, but things will be easier. He will be better able to concentrate himself."

  "What is he doing now? Wherein does he dissatisfy you?"

  "I can hardly say. He 's like a watch that 's running down. He is moody, desultory, idle, irregular, fantastic."

  "Heavens, what a list! And it 's all poor me?"

  "No, not all. But you are a part of it, and I turn to you because you are a more tangible, sensible, responsible cause than the others."

  Christina raised her hand to her eyes, and bent her head thoughtfully. Rowland was puzzled to measure the effect of his venture; she rather surprised him by her gentleness. At last, without moving, "If I were to marry him," she asked, "what would have become of his fiancee?"

  "I am bound to suppose that she would be extremely unhappy."

  Christina said nothing more, and Rowland, to let her make her reflections, left his place and strolled away. Poor Assunta, sitting patiently on a stone bench, and unprovided, on this occasion, with military consolation, gave him a bright, frank smile, which might have been construed as an expression of regret for herself, and of sympathy for her mistress. Rowland presently seated himself again near Christina.

  "What do you think," she asked, looking at him, "of your friend's infidelity?"

  "I don't like it."

  "Was he very much in love with her?"

  "He asked her to marry him. You may judge."

  "Is she rich?"

  "No, she is poor."

  "Is she very much in love with him?"

  "I know her too little to say."

  She paused again, and then resumed: "You have settled in your mind, then, that I will never seriously listen to him?"

  "I think it unlikely, until the contrary is proved."

  "How shall it be proved? How do you know what passes between us?"

  "I can judge, of course, but from appearance; but, like you, I am an observer. Hudson has not at all the air of a prosperous suitor."

  "If he is depressed, there is a reason. He has a bad conscience. One must hope so, at least. On the other hand, simply as a friend," she continued gently, "you think I can do him no good?"

  The humility of her tone, combined with her beauty, as she made this remark, was inexpressibly touching, and Rowland had an uncomfortable sense of being put at a disadvantage. "There are doubtless many good things you might do, if you had proper opportunity," he said. "But you seem to be sailing with a current which leaves you little leisure for quiet benevolence. You live in the whirl and hurry of a world into which a poor artist can hardly find it to his advantage to follow you."