RODERICK HUDSON
"Like this?" Singleton, startled, had repeated with a guilty blink.
"You remind me of a watch that never runs down. If one listens hard one hears you always at it. Tic-tic-tic, tic-tic-tic."
"Oh, I see," Singleton had returned while he beamed ingenuously. "I 'm very regular."
"You 're very regular, yes. And I suppose you find it very pleasant to be very regular?"
Singleton had hereupon turned and smiled more brightly, sucking the water from his camel's-hair brush. Then with a quickened sense of his indebtedness to a Providence that had endowed him with intrinsic facilities: "Oh, most delightful!" he had exclaimed.
Roderick had stood looking at him a moment. "Damnation!" was the single word that then had fallen from him; with which he had turned his back.
Later in the week our two friends took together one of their longest rambles. They had walked before in a dozen different directions, but had not yet crossed a charming little wooded pass which shut in their valley on one side and descended into the vale of Engelberg. In coming from Lucerne they had approached their inn by this path, and then, feeling that they knew it, had neglected it for more untrodden ways. But at last the list of these was exhausted, and Rowland proposed the walk to Engelberg as a novelty. The place is half bleak and half pastoral; a huge white monastery rises abruptly from the green floor of the valley and contributes to the somewhat spare concert of blue-green and blue-grey the diversion of a
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