“The Signorina Emilia,” Marietta promptly informed him.

“Really and truly?” questioned he.

“Ang,” affirmed Marietta, with the national jerk of the head; “the Signorina Emilia Manfredi—­the daughter of the Duca.”

“Oh—?  Then the Duca was married before?” concluded Peter, with simplicity.

“Che-e-e!” scoffed Marietta, on her highest note.  “Married?  He?” Then she winked and nodded—­as one man of the world to another.  “Ma molto porn!  La mamma fu robaccia di Milano.  But after his death, the Duchessa had her brought to the castle.  She is the same as adopted.”

“That looks as if your Duchessa’s heart were in the right place, after all,” commented Peter.

“Gia,” agreed Marietta.

“Hang the right place!” cried he.  “What’s the good of telling me her heart is in the right place, if the right place is inaccessible?”

But Marietta only looked bewildered.

He lived in his garden, he haunted the riverside, he made a daily pilgrimage to the village post, he thoroughly neglected the work he had come to this quiet spot to do.  But a week passed, during which he never once beheld so much as the shadow of the Duchessa.

On Sunday he trudged his mile, through the sun, and up the hill, not only to both Masses, but to Vespers and Benediction.

She was present at none of these offices.

“The Pagan!” he exclaimed.

VII

Up at the castle, on the broad marble terrace, where clematis and jessamine climbed over the balustrade and twined about its pilasters, where oleanders grew in tall marble urns and shed their roseate petals on the pavement, Beatrice, dressed for dinner, in white, with pearls in her hair, and pearls round her throat, was walking slowly backwards and forwards, reading a letter.

“There is a Peter Marchdale—­I don’t know whether he will be your Peter Marchdale or not, my dear; though the name seems hardly likely to be common—­son of the late Mr. Archibald Marchdale, Q. C., and nephew of old General Marchdale, of Whitstoke.  A highly respectable and stodgy Norfolk family.  I’ve never happened to meet the man myself, but I’m told he’s a bit of an eccentric, who amuses himself globe-trotting, and writing books (novels, I believe) which nobody, so far as I am aware, ever reads.  He writes under a pseudonym, Felix—­I ’m not sure whether it’s Mildmay or Wildmay.  He began life, by the bye, in the Diplomatic, and was attache for a while at Berlin, or Petersburg, or somewhere; but whether (in the elegant language of Diplomacy) he ‘chucked it up,’ or failed to pass his exams, I’m not in a position to say.  He will be near thirty, and ought to have a couple of thousand a year—­more or less.  His father, at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and must have left something decent.  And the only other thing in the world I know about him is that he’s a great friend of that clever gossip Margaret Winchfield—­which goes to show that however obscure he may be as a scribbler of fiction, he must possess some redeeming virtues as a social being—­for Mrs. Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love with bores.  As you ’re not, either—­well, verbum sap., as my little brother Freddie says.”