She mounted her bicycle.

“Good-bye,” she said, and lightly rode away.

“So-ho!  Her bigotry is not such a negligible quantity, after all,” Peter concluded.

“But what,” he demanded of Marietta, as she ministered to his wants at dinner, “what does one barrier more or less matter, when people are already divided by a gulf that never can be traversed?  You see that river?” He pointed through his open window to the Aco.  “It is a symbol.  She stands on one side of it, I stand on the other, and we exchange little jokes.  But the river is always there, flowing between us, separating us.  She is the daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke, and the fairest of her sex, and a millionaire, and a Roman Catholic.  What am I?  Oh, I don’t deny I ’m clever.  But for the rest? . . .  My dear Marietta, I am simply, in one word, the victim of a misplaced attachment.”

“Non capisco Francese,” said Marietta.

XIV

And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the Duchessa did not meet; and so he sank low and lower in his mind.

Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its value; and this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen to be literary men.  All is grist that comes to a writer’s mill.

By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned—­and in the regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be enabled to remember—­how exceeding great is the impatience of the lovesick, with what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can burn, and to what improbable lengths hours and minutes can on occasions stretch themselves.

He tried many methods of distraction.

There was always the panorama of his valley—­the dark-blue lake, pale Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling uplands westward.  There were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent haze of August, filling every distance.  There was always his garden—­there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco.  And then, at a half-hour’s walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:  —­the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting; men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing, singing, twanging mandolines, at the tables under the withered bush of the wine-shop; and two or three more pensive citizens swinging their legs from the parapet of the bridge, and angling for fish that never bit, in the impetuous stream below.