In the mornings, as she had told Vittorio, she and Jonathan usually drove out of the city to visit some nearby church or museum. Giuseppina took coffee to their room at an early hour, and before long Isabel would return the tray and its emptied dishes to the kitchen. Sometimes Vittorio was there discussing the day’s housekeeping when she came in, dressed in her white robe, and stately because of the burden of the tray, her hair hanging down her back in a heavy plait that was frayed and flat from sleep. Leaning with both hands on the kitchen table and laughing at her own halting Italian, she would chat with Giuseppina, and Vittorio, watching her, wondered why all women didn’t wear long hair.

When they returned after lunch, Jonathan went to the museum and Isabel rested through the early afternoon. At four o’clock, she took tea with Vittorio, although the ceremony of the cake was never repeated. He had thought his long, solitary afternoon essential and immutable, and was almost shocked to discover that a new habit could be so quickly, faithlessly formed. He found himself preparing for her with little imagined conversations that never came to birth, and afterward he wondered what they had talked about. Her presence seemed an immoderate, contrasting luxury in his room. As on the first day, she sat across from him, the shuttered light striping her hair and her burnished arm and distorting the colored pattern of her dress.

If Jonathan returned from the museum in time, he walked with Isabel to the piazza in the evening, but more often she went alone and waited for him in the café. Like other tourists, they read foreign papers in the fading light, and watched the crowd, and lived vicariously the pleasant life of the town. Jonathan inclined his head to Isabel’s talk with a detached, indulgent smile, and sometimes Isabel, too, fell silent. Every evening, they dined out in Siena, and when they left the piazza in search of a trattoria they walked away with slow, grave purpose, like members of a procession.

If they were still in the café when Vittorio arrived before dinner for his ritual Campari, he sat with them until it was dark, or when he was with friends stopped at their table to exchange greetings. He found Jonathan rather solemn for an Englishman, and almost defensively earnest about his work. His knowledge, which was considerable, seemed sheltered within reticence, as though it were too precious to be made a source of general pleasure. Vittorio wondered whether life were ever difficult for Isabel. He understood that they had been married for four years.