d; and this was what he saw.

Gigi entered the tool-house, and presently brought out a ladder, which
he carried down to the riverside, and left there. Then he returned to
the tool-house, and came back bearing an armful of planks, each perhaps
a foot wide by five or six feet long. Now he raised his ladder to the
perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity
resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned
the flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs,
and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and he
stood in the grounds of Ventirose.

He had improvised a bridge--a bridge that swayed upwards and downwards
more or less dizzily about the middle, if you will--but an entirely
practicable bridge, for all that. And he had saved himself at least a
good three miles, to the castle and back, by the road.

Peter watched, and admired.

"And I asked whether he was versatile!" he muttered. "Trust an Italian
for economising labour. It looks like unwarrantable invasion of friendly
territory--but it's a dodge worth remembering, all the same."

He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it again, and
again approached it to his face, communing with that ghost of a perfume.

"Heavens! how it makes one think of chiffons," he exclaimed.
"Thursday--Thursday--help me to live till Thursday!"

XVII

But he had n't to live till Thursday--he was destined to see her not
later than the next afternoon.

You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms will
spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.

It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in his
garden; and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated sunshine.

Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the sunshine
seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less sharply outlined.
Oh, it was very slight, very uncertain; you had to look twice to assure
yourself that it was n't a mere fancy. It seemed as if never so thin a
gauze had been drawn over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming,
without obscuring it. You could have ransacked the sky in vain to
discover the smallest shred of cloud.

At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day--hot, but buoyant,
but stimulant, but quick with oxygen--seemed to become thick, sluggish,
suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and to fall a
dead w