She gazed at him with those amused eyes of hers, and still again, slowly, sorrowfully, shook her head.

“Oh, your spectacles are black—­black,” she murmured.

“I hope not,” said he; “but such as they are, they show me the inevitable conditions of our planet.  The snatcher, here below, is ubiquitous and eternal—­as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of gravitation.  He is likewise protean.  Banish him—­he takes half a minute to change his visible form, and returns au galop.  Sometimes he’s an ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; sometimes he’s a splendid florid money-lender, or an aproned and obsequious greengrocer, or a trusted friend, hearty and familiar.  But he ’s always there; and he’s always—­if you don’t mind the vernacular—­’on the snatch.’”

The Duchessa arched her eyebrows.

“If things are really at such a sorry pass,” she said, “I will commend my former proposal to you with increased confidence.  You should keep a dragon.  After all, you only wish to protect your garden; and that”—­she embraced it with her glance—­“is not so very big.  You could teach your dragon, if you procured one of an intelligent breed, to devour greengrocers, trusted friends, and even moneylenders too (tough though no doubt they are), as well as sparrows.”

“Your proposal is a surrender to my contention,” said Peter.  “You would set a snatcher to catch the snatchers.  Other heights in other lives, perhaps.  But in the dark backward and abysm of space to which our lives are confined, the snatcher is indigenous and inexpugnable.”

The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns, the high bending trees, with the light caught in the network of their million leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas westward, the pale-green vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she looked at the rushing river, with the diamonds sparkling on its surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of Monte Sfiorito, at the scintillant blue shy overhead.

Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with something like gravity in her smile.

“The dark backward and abysm of space?” she repeated.  “And you do not wear black spectacles?  Then it must be that your eyes themselves are just a pair of black-seeing pessimists.”

“On the contrary,” triumphed Peter, “it is because they are optimists, that they suspect there must be forwarder and more luminous regions than the Solar System.”

The Duchessa laughed.

“I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite little teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest laughter, of any woman out of Paradise,” said Peter, in the silence of his soul.

“It is clear I shall never be your match in debate,” said she.

Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.

“But I wonder,” she went on, “whether you would put me down as ‘another species of snatcher,’ if I should ask you to spare me just the merest end of a crust of bread?” And she lifted those eyes rich in promise appealingly to his.