Yet her help was rendered in the same unconscious,
unacknowledged fashion as before; there was no explicit change in their
relations. After that distressing scene in Rome which had immediately
preceded their departure, it was of course impossible that there should
not be on Miss Garland's part some frankness of allusion to Roderick's
sad condition. She had been present, the reader will remember, during
only half of his unsparing confession, and Rowland had not seen her
confronted with any absolute proof of Roderick's passion for Christina
Light. But he knew that she knew far too much for her happiness;
Roderick had told him, shortly after their settlement at the Villa
Pandolfini, that he had had a "tremendous talk" with his cousin. Rowland
asked no questions about it; he preferred not to know what had passed
between them. If their interview had been purely painful, he wished
to ignore it for Miss Garland's sake; and if it had sown the seeds of
reconciliation, he wished to close his eyes to it for his own--for the
sake of that unshaped idea, forever dismissed and yet forever present,
which hovered in the background of his consciousness, with a hanging
head, as it were, and yet an unshamed glance, and whose lightest motions
were an effectual bribe to patience.
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