“Like a pirate?  Luigi?” she exclaimed.

“Yes,” affirmed her master.  “He wears green corduroy trousers, and a red belt, and a blue shirt.  That is the pirate uniform.  He has a swarthy skin, and a piercing eye, and hair as black as the Jolly Roger.  Those are the marks by which you recognise a pirate, even when in mufti.  I believe you said his name is Luigi?”

Yes, Signorino—­Luigi Maroni.  We call him Gigi.”

“Is Gigi versatile?” asked Peter.

“Versatile—?” puzzled Marietta.  But then, risking her own interpretation of the recondite word, “Oh, no, Signorino.  He is of the country.”

“Ah, he’s of the country, is he?  So much the better.  Then he will know the way to Castel Ventirose?”

But naturally, Signorino.”  Marietta nodded.

“And do you think, for once in a way, though not versatile, he could be prevailed upon to divert his faculties from the work of a gardener to that of a messenger?”

“A messenger, Signorino?” Marietta wrinkled up her brow.

“Ang—­an unofficial postman.  Do you think he could be induced to carry a letter for me to the castle?”

“But certainly, Signorino.  He is here to obey the Signorino’s orders.”  Marietta shrugged her shoulders, and waved her hands.

“Then tell him, please, to go and put the necessary touches to his toilet,” said Peter.  “Meanwhile I’ll indite the letter.”

When his letter was indited, he found the piratical-looking Gigi in attendance, and he gave it to him, with instructions.

Thereupon Gigi (with a smile of sympathetic intelligence, inimitably Italian) put the letter in his hat, put his hat upon his head, and started briskly off—­but not in the proper direction:  not in the direction of the road, which led to the village, and across the bridge, and then round upon itself to the gates of the park.  He started briskly off towards Peter’s own toolhouse, a low red-tiled pavilion, opposite the door of Marietta’s kitchen.

Peter was on the point of calling to him, of remonstrating.  Then he thought better of it.  He would wait a bit, and watch.

He waited and watched; 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.