Mallet," cried Mrs. Hudson, piteously, "will you leave me alone
with this?"
Rowland turned to her and informed her, gently, that he would go with
her to Florence. After he had so pledged himself he thought not at all
of the pain of his position as mediator between the mother's resentful
grief and the son's incurable weakness; he drank deep, only, of the
satisfaction of not separating from Mary Garland. If the future was a
blank to Roderick, it was hardly less so to himself. He had at moments
a lively foreboding of impending calamity. He paid it no especial
deference, but it made him feel indisposed to take the future into his
account. When, on his going to take leave of Madame Grandoni, this lady
asked at what time he would come back to Rome, he answered that he was
coming back either never or forever. When she asked him what he meant,
he said he really could n't tell her, and parted from her with much
genuine emotion; the more so, doubtless, that she blessed him in a quite
loving, maternal fashion, and told him she honestly believed him to be
the best fellow in the world.
The Villa Pandolfini stood directly upon a small grass-grown piazza,
on the top of a hill which sloped straight from one of the gates of
Florence.
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