by Henry Harland

from Chapter One:

“The Signorino will take coffee?” old Marietta asked as she set the fruit before him.

Peter deliberated for a moment, then burned his ships.

“Yes,” he answered.

“But in the garden, perhaps?” the little brown old woman suggested with a persuasive flourish.

“No,” he corrected her, gently smiling and shaking his head, “not perhaps — certainly.”

Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive. “The Signorino will find a rustic table under the big willow-tree at the water’s edge,” she informed him with a good deal of gesture. “Shall I serve it there?”

“Where you will. I leave myself entirely in your hands,” he said.

So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the willow, sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in contemplation at the view.

Of its kind, it was rather a striking view.

In the immediate foreground —at his feet, indeed—  there was the river, the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on either bank, rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of the lake. Then, just across the river, at his left, stretched the smooth lawns of the park of Ventirose, with glimpses of the many-pinnacled castle through the trees; and, beyond, undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by numberless white villas. At his right loomed the gaunt mass of the Gnisi, with its black forests, its bare crags, its foaming cascade, and the crenelated range of the Cornobastone; and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley’s end, Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour in the evening sunshine against the intense blue of the sky.

A familiar verse had come into Peter’s mind and kept running there obstinately.

“Really,” he said to himself, “feature for feature, down to the very ‘cataract leaping in glory,’ the scene might have been got up, aprés coup, to illustrate it.” And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed words, under his breath . . . .

But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.

*        *        * 

 “It’s not altogether a bad sort of view — is it?” someone said, in English.

The voice was a woman’s. It was clear and smooth; it was crisp-cut, distinguished.

Peter glanced about him.

On the opposite bank of the Aco in the grounds of Ventirose, five or six yards away, a lady was standing, looking at him, smiling…

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