Now the road improved abruptly and she passed quickly into the open plain. It wasn’t until she entered the open gates of the villa and found herself in a short, shaded driveway that she recalled how early it was. She hoped the Conte took his afternoon nap in some lofty chamber, far from the reverberations of his doorbell. Perhaps a servant would come out to meet her so that she need not even ring. It was no time of day to pay a call.

Parking the car under the trees, she opened the door, swung her legs to the ground, took out her mirror and comb. When she looked again at her watch, it was still no more than three o’clock. She closed the door with a warning slam, and walked through the garden to the house.

She saw at once that this was no ordinary villa. Or, rather, that it was singular just for being ordinary in a part of the world where every country house is distinguished. One could not have said, for example, that the house was ill-sited; it simply had no site—as if on this unexpected plain, between so many inviting elevations, its owner had jabbed a finger and said, “I’ll have my house there,” with no reflection whatever. Moreover, it was a new house: though built in the Florentine manner and stuccoed the usual light pleasing yellow, it was certainly no more than fifty years old. And it had, of all things, a prosaic, comfortable, almost suburban porch fitted into its main façade—a porch that had nothing to do with noble loggias or spacious terraces and in which a fringed, swinging garden seat had been installed. This seat was littered with magazines.

Mrs. Drew turned to look back at the garden she had come through. Pebbled paths led to a large pond, almost a little lake, but here too something was peculiar. Although its form had been prettily reproduced from some old design, the pond was disproportionately shallow; at present, though half full, the water made little more than a deep film, clustered with rubbery foliage. Around it, the garden was extensive, well tended, and, even on this hot afternoon, brilliantly alight with flowers.

The doorbell was of the kind that draws out from the wall on a handle—the handle in this case being a flowered ceramic one. Olivia Drew heard it ring inside the house, but this sound was followed by no other. Rather than ring a second time, she wondered whether she might simply drive on to one of the villages she had seen. She stood on the porch, undecided, her eye wandering over the scattered magazines with their cover photographs of royalty, posed and deposed. There was a full ashtray on a wicker table, and a loop of narrow purple ribbon.

She was about to go down the steps when she noticed, on the wall of the porch facing the swing seat, an engraved plaque: