"So much the better for him now," said Peter.

"Gia," approved Marietta, and solemnly made the Sign of the Cross.

"But will you have the kindness to explain to me," the young man continued, "how it happens that the d.u.c.h.essa di Santangiolo speaks English as well as I do?"

The old woman frowned surprise.

"Come? She speaks English?"

"For all the world like an Englishman," a.s.severated Peter.

"Ah, well," Marietta reflected, "she was English, you know."

"Oho!" exclaimed Peter. "She was English! Was she?" He bore a little on the tense of the verb. "That lets in a flood of light. And--and what, by the bye, is she now?" he questioned.

"Ma! Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca," Marietta replied.

"Indeed? Then the leopard can change his spots?" was Peter's inference.

"The leopard?" said Marietta, at a loss.

"If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n't I?"

Peter demanded. "At all events, the d.u.c.h.essa di Santangiolo is a very beautiful woman."

"The Signorino has seen her?" Marietta asked.

"I have grounds for believing so. An apparition--a phantom of delight--appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco, and announced herself as my landlady. Of course, she may have been an impostor--but she made no attempt to get the rent. A tall woman, in white, with hair, and a figure, and a voice like cooling streams, and an eye that can speak volumes with a look."

Marietta nodded recognition.

"That would be the d.u.c.h.essa."

"She's a very beautiful d.u.c.h.essa," reiterated Peter.

Marietta was Italian. So, Italian--wise, she answered, "We are all as G.o.d makes us."

"For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe," Peter averred.

Marietta opened her eyes wide.

"For years? The Signorino knows her? The Signorino has seen her before?"

A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that afternoon in the train. He adapted it to the occasion.

"I rather think she is my long-lost brother."

"Brother--?" faltered Marietta.

"Well, certainly not sister," said Peter, with determination. "You have my permission to take away the coffee things."

IV

Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a letter to a friend in England.

"Villa Floriano," she wrote, among other words, "has been let to an Englishman--a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in a dinner jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent eye for Nature--named Peter Marchdale. Do you happen by any chance to know who he is, or anything about him?"

V

Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the villa; and more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow his pious e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of the afternoon: "What luck! What supernatural luck!" He was up, in any case, at an unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his garden.

"It really is a surprisingly jolly garden," he confessed. "The agent was guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were not the perjuries one feared."

There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow that overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood along its border.

Then there was the peac.o.c.k-blue river itself, dancing and singing as it sped away, with a thousand diamonds flashing on its surface--floating, sinking, rising--where the sun caught its ripples. There were some charming bits of greensward. There was a fountain, plashing melodious coolness, in a nimbus of spray which the sun touched to rainbow pinks and yellows. There were vivid parterres of flowers, begonia and geranium. There were oleanders, with their heady southern perfume; there were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots of scarlet crepe; there were white carnations, sweet-peas, heliotrope, mignonette; there were endless roses. And there were birds, birds, birds. Everywhere you heard their joyous piping, the busy flutter of their wings. There were goldfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, with their young--the plumpest, clumsiest, ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age ingrat, just beginning to fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents--and there were also (I regret to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were bees and b.u.mblebees; there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were b.u.t.terflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples; there were also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies--but che volete? Who minds a gadfly or two in Italy? On the other side of the house there were fig-trees and peach-trees, and artichokes holding their heads high in rigid rows; and a vine, heavy with great cl.u.s.ters of yellow grapes, was festooned upon the northern wall.

The morning air was ineffably sweet and keen--penetrant, tonic, with moist, racy smells, the smell of the good brown earth, the smell of green things and growing things. The dew was spread over the gra.s.s like a veil of silver gossamer, spangled with crystals. The friendly country westward, vineyards and white villas, laughed in the sun at the Gnisi, sulking black in shadow to the east. The lake lay deep and still, a dark sapphire. And away at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, always insubstantial-seeming, showed pale blue-grey, upon a sky in which still lingered some of the flush of dawn.

It was a surprisingly jolly garden, true enough. But though Peter remained in it all day long--though he haunted the riverside, and cast a million desirous glances, between the trees, and up the lawns, towards Castel Ventirose--he enjoyed no briefest vision of the d.u.c.h.essa di Santangiolo.

Nor the next day; nor the next.

"Why does n't that old dowager ever come down and look after her river?"

he asked Marietta. "For all the attention she gives it, the water might be undermining her property on both sides."

"That old dowager--?" repeated Marietta, blank.

"That old widow woman--my landlady--the d.u.c.h.essa Vedova di Santangiolo."

"She is not very old--only twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Marietta.

"Don't try to persuade me that she is n't old enough to know better,"

retorted Peter, sternly.

"But she has her guards, her keepers, to look after her property," said Marietta.

"Guards and keepers are mere mercenaries. If you want a thing well done, you should do it yourself," said Peter, with gloomy sententiousness.

On Sunday he went to the little grey rococo parish church. There were two Ma.s.ses, one at eight o'clock, one at ten--and the church was quite a mile from Villa Floriano, and up a hill; and the Italian sun was hot--but the devoted young man went to both.