azione_ with the De Sancti. She will go with Signora Aurelia to
see the Palio and only come back here to supper."

Gemma went back to her room to finish her dressing. She put on a pink
muslin frock and a hat of white straw wreathed with roses and leaves.
Surely her beauty should avail to give her all she desired, light and
warmth always, diamonds and fine laces, and silks to clothe her and
give her grace, and the possession of the one man's heart, with his
name and a place in the world beside him. Surely she was not destined
to live with Orazio and his tiresome mother, penned up in a shabby
little house in Lucca, and there growing old and hideous. She sat
before her glass thinking these thoughts and waiting until she heard
Olive's quick, light step in the passage and then the opening and
shutting of the front door. Carolina was in the kitchen and the others
had gone to lie down, but she went into the dining-room and listened
for a moment there before she ventured into her cousin's room. She had
often been in to pry when alone in the flat, and she knew where to
look for the key of the attic in the Vicolo. Olive always kept it in a
corner of the table drawer and it was there now. Gemma smiled her rare
slow smile as she put it in her purse. There was a photograph of her
aunt--Olive's mother--on the dressing-table, and a Tauchnitz edition
of Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_ lay beside it, the embroidered
tassel of the marker being one of Astorre's pitiful little gifts. She
swept them off on to the floor and poured the contents of the
ink-stand over them. She had acted on a spiteful impulse, and she was
half afraid when she saw the black stream trickling over the book and
blotting out the face of the woman who had been of her kin. It seemed
unlucky, a _malore_, and she was vexed with herself. She looked into
the kitchen on her way out. "Carolina, if they ask where I am I have
gone to church."

The old woman nodded. "Very well, signorina, but you are becoming too
devout. _Bada, figlia mia!_"

Siena is a city dedicated to the Virgin, and the feast of her
Assumption is the greatest of all her red-letter days. The streets had
echoed at dawn to the feet of _contadini_ coming in by the Porta
Romana, the Porta Camollia, the Porta Pespini. The oxen had been fed
and left in their stalls; there was no ploughing in the fields on this
day, no gathering of figs, no sound of singing voices and laughter in
the vineyards. The brown wrin