He had Roderick to please now, for whom disappointment would be cruel; but he said to himself that certainly, if there were no Roderick in the case, the ship should sail without him.
He asked Hudson several questions about his cousin, but Roderick, confidential on most points, seemed to have reasons of his own for being reticent on this one.

His measured answers quickened Rowland's curiosity, for Miss Garland, with her own irritating half-suggestions, had only to be a subject of guarded allusion in others to become intolerably interesting.

He learned from Roderick that she was the daughter of a country minister, a far-away cousin of his mother, settled in another part of the State; that she was one of a half-a-dozen daughters, that the family was very poor, and that she had come a couple of months before to pay his mother a long visit.

"It is to be a very long one now," he said, "for it is settled that she is to remain while I am away." The fermentation of contentment in Roderick's soul reached its climax a few days before the young men were to make their farewells.

He had been sitting with his friends on Cecilia's veranda, but for half an hour past he had said nothing.