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 weight upon the earth.  And this effect was accompanied by a sudden silence—­the usual busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly suspended:  the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered; not a leaf rustled:  the world held its breath.  And if the river went on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the silence—­accented, underscored it.

Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the sky—­still, for a minute or two . . . .  Then, before you knew how it had happened, the snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were completely lapped in cloud.

And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity—­spread and sank, cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist, curling in smoky wreaths among the battlements of the Cornobastone, turning the lake from sapphire to sombre steel, filling the entire valley with a strange mixture of darkness and an uncanny pallid light.  Overhead it hung like a vast canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe of fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the horizon diffused a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.

Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder; in a minute, a louder, angrier growl—­as if the first were a menace which had not been heeded.  Then there was a violent gush of wind—­cold; smelling of the forests from which it came; scattering everything before it, dust, dead leaves, the fallen petals of flowers; making the trees writhe and labour, like giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the short grass shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake.  Then two or three big raindrops fell—­and then, the deluge.