But all the accusations were not his.  He had been watching, once, during some brief argument, to see whether she would take her forefinger out of her Murray, into which she had inserted it to keep a certain page.  It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had not the slightest real apprehension that she was dry or pedantic.  The simple human truth was, the poor fellow was jealous of science.  In preaching science to her, he had over-estimated his powers of self-effacement.  Suddenly, sinking science for the moment, she looked at him very frankly and began to frown.  At the same time she let the Murray slide down to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance that he made no movement to pick it up.

“You are singularly inconsistent, Mr. Mallet,” she said.

“How?”

“That first day that we were in Saint Peter’s you said things that inspired me.  You bade me plunge into all this.  I was all ready; I only wanted a little push; yours was a great one; here I am in mid-ocean!  And now, as a reward for my bravery, you have repeatedly snubbed me.”

“Distinctly, then,” said Rowland, “I strike you as inconsistent?”

“That is the word.”

“Then I have played my part very ill.”

“Your part?  What is your part supposed to have been?”

He hesitated a moment.  “That of usefulness, pure and simple.”

“I don’t understand you!” she said; and picking up her Murray, she fairly buried herself in it.

That evening he said something to her which necessarily increased her perplexity, though it was not uttered with such an intention.  “Do you remember,” he asked, “my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally as I told you?  It seemed to me you tacitly consented.”

“Very tacitly.”

“I have never yet really presumed on your consent.  But now I would like you to do this:  whenever you catch me in the act of what you call inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term.  I will know what you mean; a word to the wise!”

One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars.  Nothing in Rome is more interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms.  It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics, possibly, of Nero’s Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where, in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna.  The day left a deep impression on Rowland’s mind, partly owing to its intrinsic sweetness, and partly because his companion, on this occasion, let her Murray lie unopened for an hour, and asked several questions irrelevant to the Consuls and the Caesars.  She had begun by saying that it was coming over her, after all, that Rome was a ponderously sad place.  The sirocco was gently blowing, the air was heavy, she was tired, she looked a little pale.