g, and only
the thin shrilling of the locusts broke the August silence. The
parched earth was pale, and great cracks that only the autumn rains
could fill had opened on the hillsides, but the ripening maize lay
snug within its narrow sheaths of green, and the leaves of the vines
hid great bunches of purpling grapes. In the fields men rested awhile
from their labours, and the patient white oxen stood in the shade of
the mulberries, while the sunburnt lads who drove them bathed their
tired bodies in the stream, or lay idly in the lush grass at the
water's edge.

In the town the walls of houses that had fronted the morning sun were
scorching to the touch, and there was no coolness even in the steep
northward streets that were always in shadow, or in the grey
stone-paved courts of the palaces. There were few people about at this
hour, and the little stream of traffic had run dry in the Via Cavour.
A vendor of melons drew his barrow close up to the battered old column
in the Piazza Tolomei, and squatted down on the ground beside it.
"_Cocomeri! Fresc' e buoni!_" he cried once or twice, and then rolled
over and went to sleep. A peasant girl carrying a basket of eggs
passed presently, and she looked wistfully at the fruit, but she did
not disturb his slumbers.

"Is that the aunt of your friend's mother? No, it is the sister of my
niece's governess." Olive laid down her pen. She was only partially
dressed and her hair hung loosely about her bare white shoulders. The
heat made hairpins seem a burden and outer garments superfluous. "My
niece's governess is the last. Thank Heaven for that!" she said, and
she sat down on the brick floor to take off her stockings. Gemma's
_fidanzato_, her lawyer from Lucca, was coming to Siena for a week. He
would lodge next door and come in to the Menotti for most of his
meals, and already poor old Carolina was busy in the hot, airless
kitchen, beating up eggs for a _zabajone_, and Signora Carosi had gone
out to buy ice for the wine and sweet cakes to be handed round with
little glasses of _vin_ Santo or Marsala.

Carmela came into her cousin's room soon after four o'clock. "I have
just taken Gemma a cup of black coffee. Her head aches terribly."

"I heard her moving about her room in the night," Olive answered, and
she added, under her breath, "Poor Gemma!"

Carmela lowered her voice too. "Of course Maria and I know that you
see what is going on as well as we do. There is some man ... she le