ry
emotions, being perennial, tend to express themselves in perennial
formulae."

VI

Back at the villa, he enquired of Marietta who the pretty brown-eyed
young girl might have been.

"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, Fe