Marietta was Italian. So, Italian--wise, she answered, "We are all as
God 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 ejaculation
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 peacock-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,