"Villa Floriano," she wrote, among other words, "has been let
to an Englishman--a youngish, presentable-looking creature, in
a dinner jacket, with a tongue in his head, and an indulgent
eye for Nature--named Peter Marchdale. Do you happen by any
chance to know who he is, or anything about him?"



IV


Peter very likely slept but little, that first night at the
villa; and more than once, I fancy, he repeated to his pillow
his pious ejaculation of the afternoon: "What luck! What
supernatural luck!" He was up, in any case, at an
unconscionable hour next morning, up, and down in his garden.

"It really is a surprisingly jolly garden," he confessed. "The
agent was guiltless of exaggeration, and the photographs were
not the perjuries one feared."

There were some fine old trees, lindens, acacias, chestnuts, a
flat-topped Lombardy pine, a darkling ilex, besides the willow
that overhung the river, and the poplars that stiffly stood
along its border. Then there was the peacock-blue river
itself, dancing and singing as it sped away, with a thousand
diamonds flashing on its surface--floating, sinking, rising
--where the sun caught its ripples. There were some charming
bits of greensward. There was a fountain, plashing melodious
coolness, in a nimbus of spray which the sun touched to rainbow