Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/471

 "Fallen—fallen!" sighed Mrs. Hudson. "Just hear him!"

"I 'll do anything you say, my dear man," Roderick continued. "I 'll do anything you want. I 've not been unkind to my mother have I, mother? I was unkind yesterday, without meaning it; for, after all, you know, all that had to be said. Murder will out, and my little troubles 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 exhibition of his work, got up again and went back to the great figure in which, during his divine first freshness, he had embodied his idea of the primal Adam.

Mrs. Hudson fixed her eyes upon the opposite wall. 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 his friend, all radiance and intelligence, as if there had never been a difference of opinion between them; as if each had ever been for both, unalterably, and both unalterably 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 apartments 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, 437