The prospect was well worth her attention, with its blue and green and gold, its wood and water, its misty-blushing snows, its spaciousness and its atmosphere.  In the sky a million fluffy little cloudlets floated like a flock of fantastic birds, with mother-of-pearl tinted plumage.  The shadows were lengthening now.  The sunshine glanced from the smooth surface of the lake as from burnished metal, and falling on the coloured sails of the fishing-boats, made them gleam like sails of crimson silk.  But I wonder how much of this Beatrice really saw.

She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set along the balustrade, and pressed the pink blossom against her face, and, closing her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then, absent-minded, she let it drop, over the terrace, upon the path below.

“It’s impossible,” she said suddenly, aloud.  At last she went into the house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room.  There she took a book from the table, and sank into a deep easy-chair, and began to turn the pages.

But when, by and by, approaching footsteps became audible in the stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the book, thrust it back upon the table, and caught up another so that Emilia Manfredi, entering, found her reading Monsieur Anatole France’s “Etui de nacre.”

“Emilia,” she said, “I wish you would translate the I Jongleur de Notre Dame’ into Italian.”

XXII

Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a state of some excitement.

“He ought to have told her—­”

“It was her right to be told—­”

“What could her rank matter—­”

“A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman—­”

“She would have despised the conventional barriers—­”

“No woman could be proof against such a compliment—­”

The case was peculiar—­ordinary rules could not apply to it—­”

“Every man gets the wife he deserves—­and he had certainly gone a long way towards deserving her—­”

“He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in it—­he need n’t have mentioned love—­she would have understood—­”

The Duchessa’s voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged, repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.

“Ought I to have told her—­then and there?  Shall I go to her and tell her to-morrow?”

He tried to think; but he could not think.  His faculties were in a whirl—­he could by no means command them.  He could only wait, inert, while the dance went on.  It was an extremely riotous dance.  The Duchessa’s conversation was reproduced without sequence, without coherence—­scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder.  If he would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration—­a speech of hers, a look, an inflection—­then the whole experience suddenly lost its outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was left, as it were, intellectually gasping.