“I am a fool—­and a double fool—­and a triple fool,” he said.  “I am a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could come of it.  I have wasted time enough.  The next best thing to winning is to know when you are beaten.  I acknowledge myself beaten.  I will go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”

He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with eyes that abjured it.

Olympus, no doubt, laughed.

XXV

“I shall go back to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed.”

But he took no immediate steps to get them packed.

“Hope,” observes the clear-sighted French publicist quoted in the preceding chapter, “hope dies hard.”

Hope, Peter fancied, had received its death-blow that afternoon.  Already, that evening, it began to revive a little.  It was very much enfeebled; it was very indefinite and diffident; but it was not dead.  It amounted, perhaps, to nothing more than a vague kind of feeling that he would not, on the whole, make his departure for England quite so precipitate as, in the first heat of his anger, the first chill of his despair, he had intended.  Piano, piano!  He would move slowly, he would do nothing rash.

But he was not happy, he was very far from happy.  He spent a wretched night, a wretched, restless morrow.  He walked about a great deal—­about his garden, and afterwards, when the damnable iteration of his garden had become unbearable, he walked to the village, and took the riverside path, under the poplars, along the racing Aco, and followed it, as the waters paled. and broadened, for I forget how many joyless, unremunerative miles.

When he came home, fagged out and dusty, at dinner time, Marietta presented a visiting card to him, on her handsomest salver.  She presented it with a flourish that was almost a swagger.

Twice the size of an ordinary visiting-card, the fashion of it was roughly thus: 

                   IlCardle Udeschini
          Sacr:  Congr:  Archiv:  et Inscript:  Praef: 

Palazzo Udeschini.

And above the legend, was pencilled, in a small oldfashioned hand, wonderfully neat and pretty:—­

“To thank Mr. Marchdale for his courtesy in returning my snuff-box.”

“The Lord Prince Cardinal Udeschini was here,” said Marietta.  There was a swagger in her accent.  There was also something in her accent that seemed to rebuke Peter for his absence.

“I had inferred as much from this,” said he, tapping the card.  “We English, you know, are great at putting two and two together.”

“He came in a carriage,” said Marietta.

“Not really?” said her master.

“Ang—­veramente,” she affirmed.

“Was—­was he alone?” Peter asked, an obscure little twinge of hope stirring in his heart.