“For years I have thought her the most beautiful woman in Europe,” Peter averred. Marietta opened her eyes wide. “For years? The Signorino knows her? The Signorino has seen her before?” A phrase came back to him from a novel he had been reading that afternoon in the train. He adapted it to the occasion. “I rather think she is my long-lost brother.” “Brother--?” faltered Marietta. “Well, certainly not sister,” said Peter, with determination. “You have my permission to take away the coffee things.” IV Up at the castle, in her rose-and-white boudoir, Beatrice was writing a letter to a friend in England. “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?” V 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 pinks and yellows. There were vivid parterres of flowers, begonia and geranium. There were oleanders, with their heady southern perfume; there were pomegranate-blossoms, like knots of scarlet crepe; there were white carnations, sweet-peas, heliotrope, mignonette; there were endless roses. And there were birds, birds, birds. Everywhere you heard their joyous piping, the busy flutter of their wings. There were goldfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, with their young--the plumpest, clumsiest, ruffle-feathered little blunderers, at the age ingrat, just beginning to fly, a terrible anxiety to their parents--and there were also (I regret to own) a good many rowdy sparrows. There were bees and bumblebees; there were brilliant, dangerous-looking dragonflies; there were butterflies, blue ones and white ones, fluttering in couples; there were also (I am afraid) a good many gadflies--but che volete? Who minds a gadfly or two in Italy? On the other side of the house there were fig-trees and peach-trees, and artichokes holding their heads high in