"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.
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