Then came a day, however, when
it seemed for a moment that if she were disposed she might gather up the
crumbs of the feast. Longueville, every morning after breakfast, took
a turn in the great square of Siena--the vast piazza, shaped like
a horse-shoe, where the market is held beneath the windows of that
crenellated palace from whose overhanging cornice a tall, straight tower
springs up with a movement as light as that of a single plume in the
bonnet of a captain. Here he strolled about, watching a brown contadino
disembarrass his donkey, noting the progress of half an hour's chaffer
over a bundle of carrots, wishing a young girl with eyes like animated
agates would let him sketch her, and gazing up at intervals at the
beautiful, slim tower, as it played at contrasts with the large blue
air. After he had spent the greater part of a week in these grave
considerations, he made up his mind to leave Siena. But he was not
content with what he had done for his portfolio. Siena was eminently
sketchable, but he had not been industrious. On the last morning of his
visit, as he stood staring about him in the crowded piazza, and feeling
that, in spite of its picturesqueness, this was an awkward place for
setting up an easel, he bethought himself, by contrast, of a quiet
corner in another part of the town, which he had chanced upon in one
of his first walks--an angle of a lonely terrace that abutted upon the
city-wall, where three or four superannuated objects seemed to slumber
in the sunshine--the open door of an empty church, with a faded fresco
exposed to the air in the arch above it, and an ancient beggar-woman
sitting beside it on a three-legged stool.
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