that we should hardly find in a
landscape on the stage."

"Yes--perhaps there is," she admitted thoughtfully.

And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.

"Are you aware," the lady asked, after a brief silence, "that it is a
singularly lovely evening."

"I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so," Peter answered, with the
least approach to a meaning bow.

In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second, the
faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she
went on, with fine detachment

"How calm and still it is. The wonderful peace of the day's compline. It
seems as if the earth had stopped breathing--does n't it? The birds have
already gone to bed, though the sun is only just setting. It is the
hour when they are generally noisiest; but they have gone to bed--the
sparrows and the finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal
in the article of sleep. That is because they feel the touch of autumn.
How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this first touch of
autumn--it is like sad distant music. Can you analyse it, can you
explain it? There is no chill, it is quite warm, and yet one knows
somehow that autumn is here. The birds know it, and have gone to bed.
In another month they will be flying away, to Africa and the
Hesperides--all of them except the sparrows, who stay all winter. I
wonder how they get on during the winter, with no goldfinches to snatch
from?"

She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one appealing
to an authority for information.

"Oh, they snatch from each other, during the winter," he explained. "It
is thief rob thief, when honest victims are not forthcoming. And--what
is more to the point--they must keep their beaks in, against the return
of the goldfinches with the spring."

The Duchessa--for I scorn to deceive the trustful reader longer; and (as
certain fines mouches, despite my efforts at concealment, may ere this
have suspected) the mysterious lady was no one else--the Duchessa gaily
laughed.

"Yes," she said, "the goldfinches will return with the spring. But isn't
that rather foolish of them? If I were a goldfinch, I think I should
make my abode permanent in the sparrowless south."

"There is no sparrowless south," said Peter. "Sparrows, alas, abound in
every latitude; and the farther south you go, the fiercer and bolder and
more impudent they become. In Africa and the Hesperides, which you h