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they had always had this communion of feeling, always been completely happy in each other’s presence. Mrs. Green’s eyes were bright. “We are looking at the hills that Perugino and Piero della Francesca looked at,” she said.
    Later they went out together and stood looking up at the house, the ancient broken tiles of the roof, through which the rain came in, the walls where the packing of clay between the stones had crumbled away, the darkness and dankness of the ground floor, where for most of the century farm animals had been kept. There was a lot that needed doing to the house but the form of it was beautiful. It sat there, long and low, dressed in the time-warmed colors of its stone, the outside staircase with its broad terra-cotta steps leading up to the colonnaded porch. It would be a beautifulhouse when it was finished—this was something the Greens told each other often.
    “This Blemish seems a smart young fellow,” Mr. Green said. “Doesn’t know a whole lot about painting.”
    “Perhaps he can do something for us.” Mrs. Green took her husband’s arm and they began to walk back to the house. “Perhaps this is the turning point.”
    “Twenty-four dollars is not so much and we can discontinue with him anytime we like—he is not asking for anything in writing.”
    “He seemed straightforward enough,” Mrs. Green said.
    “Funny way with his eyes sometimes,” Mr. Green said. “Kind of sleepy. Why do you think he kept referring to himself as ‘we’?”

    Later that morning a wind sprang up and it began to feel colder. Harold and Cecilia Chapman walked the half mile or so to the Checchetti house and inspected the collapsed wall. No attempt had yet been made to clear away the rubble that lay along the edge of the road below the house. The width of the road was considerably reduced, Harold noticed; there was room enough for a car to pass and probably a van or medium-sized truck, but nothing any bigger. That faint whisper of alarm sounded again. This was the only way out to the village by car; the road did not proceed beyond the German’s place, petering out in vineyards and deeply rutted tracks unfit for motor vehicles of almost any sort. Anyone who wanted to get onto the road leading to the village and the greater world beyond had to go this way.
    “Just as I thought,” he said. “This wall had no foundations whatever. It looks to me as if they laid the blocks down flat, with hardly any digging at all.”
    At this point they were joined by the Checchetti, father and daughter, who converged on them from different directions. Of the husband there was nothing to be seen. The two approached rapidly and in complete silence. Then, while still some yards away, they came to a halt and fell to regarding the strewn debris of their wall. This muteness, which had seemed strange at first, Cecilia now recognized as a powerful dramatic device: the Checchetti were hoping that the sight of the wall with themselves standing by it as tragic witnesses would plead their case more powerfully than words.
    “Tell them,” Harold said, “what they know full well already, that their precious wall had no foundation, they built it on the cheap and this heavy rain has brought it down.”
    While Cecilia was still struggling to convey her husband’s meaning more gently and tactfully, the father retreated to a distance of some dozen yards and began shouting loudly.
    “Is he uttering threats?” Harold said. “I won’t proceed on that basis and they had better know it.”
    “No, no.” Cecilia paused, listening. “No, it is his way of discussing things. He is saying, as far as I can make out, that whether the wall had foundations or not is completely beside the point.”
    “Discussing things? The man is a complete savage. What does he do when he feels like shouting? How can it be beside the point when—”
    “He says the point at issue is not the foundation but what caused the wall to collapse.”
    The woman now spoke