isco Francese," said Marietta.

XIV

And after that, for I forget how many days, Peter and the Duchessa did
not meet; and so he sank low and lower in his mind.

Nothing that can befall us, optimists aver, is without its value; and
this, I have heard, is especially true if we happen to be literary men.
All is grist that comes to a writer's mill.

By his present experience, accordingly, Peter learned--and in the
regretful prose of some future masterpiece will perhaps be enabled to
remember--how exceeding great is the impatience of the lovesick,
with what febrile vehemence the smitten heart can burn, and to
what improbable lengths hours and minutes can on occasions stretch
themselves.

He tried many methods of distraction.

There was always the panorama of his valley--the dark-blue lake, pale
Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling uplands westward. There
were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched
shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent
haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his
garden--there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high
spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees,
the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their
music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic
spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's
walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top
church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded
frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian
life:--the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their
toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting;
men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing, singing, twanging
mandolines, at the tables under the withered bush of the wine-shop; and
two or three more pensive citizens swinging their legs from the parapet
of the bridge, and angling for fish that never bit, in the impetuous
stream below.

Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw them.
But, for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator of the sense of
beauty, might have been the basest unit of his own purblind Anglo-Saxon
public. They were the background for an absent figure. They were the
stage-accessories of a drama whose action was arrested. They were an
empty theatre.

He tried to read