“Ah, well,” Marietta reflected, “she was English, you know.”

“Oho!” exclaimed Peter.  “She was English!  Was she?” He bore a little on the tense of the verb.  “That lets in a flood of light.  And—­and what, by the bye, is she now?” he questioned.

“Ma!  Italian, naturally, since she married the Duca,” Marietta replied.

“Indeed?  Then the leopard can change his spots?” was Peter’s inference.

“The leopard?” said Marietta, at a loss.

“If the Devil may quote Scripture for his purpose, why may n’t I?” Peter demanded.  “At all events, the Duchessa di Santangiolo is a very beautiful woman.”

The Signorino has seen her?” Marietta asked.

“I have grounds for believing so.  An apparition—­a phantom of delight—­appeared on the opposite bank of the tumultuous Aco, and announced herself as my landlady.  Of course, she may have been an impostor—­but she made no attempt to get the rent.  A tall woman, in white, with hair, and a figure, and a voice like cooling streams, and an eye that can speak volumes with a look.”

Marietta nodded recognition.

“That would be the Duchessa.”

“She’s a very beautiful duchessa,” reiterated Peter.

Marietta was Italian.  So, Italian—­wise, she answered, “We are all as God makes us.”

“For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe,” Peter averred.

Marietta opened her eyes wide.

“For years?  The Signorino knows her?  The Signorino has seen her before?”

A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that afternoon in the train.  He adapted it to the occasion.

“I rather think she is my long-lost brother.”

“Brother—?” faltered Marietta.

“Well, certainly not sister,” said Peter, with determination.  “You have my permission to take away the coffee things.”

IV

Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a letter to a friend in England.

“Villa Floriano,” she wrote, among other words, “has been let to an Englishman—­a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in a dinner jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent eye for Nature—­named Peter Marchdale.  Do you happen by any chance to know who he is, or anything about him?”

IV

Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the villa; and more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow his pious ejaculation of the afternoon:  “What luck!  What supernatural luck!” He was up, in any case, at an unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his garden.

“It really is a surprisingly jolly garden,” he confessed.  “The agent was guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were not the perjuries one feared.”