Lying on her back with her eyes closed, Harriet reached out her arm for the little traveling clock, lifted it onto her chest, and held it there, too sleepy to look at it. It rose and fell on her breastbone for a few moments, and then tumbled forward with a glassy slap.

Raising the clock before her face, she opened her eyes. “Five past four,” she announced. She put the clock back on the table and looked about the room. On the wall, the sunlight seemed less certain now, the design of leaves a little blurred. “Yes?” she called, in answer to a knock on her door.

Marina came into the room and leaned on the high brass rail at the end of the bed. Harriet once again had the sensation of being treated as an invalid, and sat up, cross-legged, smoothing her skirt over her knees. “You’ve changed your dress,” she said.

“I got muddy from gardening,” Marina explained.

“You shouldn’t have gone out in the sun,” Harriet said, with satisfaction.

“It did me no harm. Did you sleep? I came to ask if you would come down for tea.” Tea, unexpectedly, was always precisely that—thin, hot tea in chipped cups, uncompromised by cakes or biscuits.

“Is it really time for tea?” Harriet glanced again at the clock. “I thought the afternoon would never end. Didn’t you?”

Marina straightened her back and smiled. “Every afternoon of the summer, I have serious doubts of the evening,” she said. “No amount of repetition reassures me.” She released the brass bar of the bed. “I must go and see if Daniele wants tea.”

Harriet lowered a foot to the floor, feeling for her sandals, and promised to come downstairs. But as the door closed, she crossed the room and, resting her hands on the window sill, looked again into the garden. The light was the easier light of late afternoon. Farther along the wall, between the columns of the loggia, geraniums were fluttered by a faint breeze. On a nearby hill, a bell was rung—an unmelodious, useful country bell. Two little barefoot girls in faded pink dresses and straw hats were carrying to the kitchen a basket of zucchini for the evening meal. Each held a handle, and the tilting basket was covered by the golden flowers of the plant; these would be fried tomorrow for the lunch table.

Harriet turned to the mirror, where a face glimmered in the glass, shadowed by tousled hair. She would go and look for Francis, with some atoning suggestion for a walk together. Oppressed by obligation, she leaned her elbows on the bureau and heard him calling her somewhere in the house. Inaudibly and mechanically, she answered him. “Yes, dear.”

The endearment was disconcertingly sharp, but she looked again into the glass and, as his steps drew near, slowly began to comb her hair.