The Cardinal's Snuff Box

The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns,

the high bending trees, with the light caught in the network of

their million leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas

westward, the pale-green vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she

looked at the rushing river, with the diamonds sparkling on its

surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of Monte Sfiorito, at

the scintillant blue shy overhead.

Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with

something like gravity in her smile.

"The dark backward and abysm of space?" she repeated. "And you

do not wear black spectacles? Then it must be that your eyes

themselves are just a pair of black-seeing pessimists."

"On the contrary," triumphed Peter, "it is because they are

optimists, that they suspect there must be forwarder and more

luminous regions than the Solar System."

The Duchessa laughed.

"I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite

little teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest

laughter, of any woman out of Paradise," said Peter, in the

silence of his soul.

"It is clear I shall never be your match in debate," said she.

Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.

"But I wonder," she went on, "whether you would put me down as

'another species of snatcher,' if I should ask you to spare me

just the merest end of a crust of bread?" And she lifted those

eyes rich in promise appealingly to his.

"Oh, I beg of you--take all I have," he responded, with

effusion. "But--but how--?"

"Toss," she commanded tersely.

So he tossed what was left of his bread into the air, above the

river; and the Duchessa, easily, deftly, threw up a hand, and

caught it on the wing.

"Thank you very much," she laughed, with a little bow.

Then she crumbled the bread, and began to sprinkle the ground

with it; and in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of

birds. Peter was at liberty to watch her, to admire the swift

grace of her motions, their suggestion of delicate strength, of

joy in things physical, and the lithe elasticity of her figure,

against the background of satiny lawn, and the further vistas

of lofty sunlit trees. She was dressed in white, as always--a

frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if you

might have passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes

of small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her

bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big

daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair,

warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of brownish

gold.