Cynthia, looking off towards the walls through the sweet scented moonlight, felt very sorry for this little Southerner. But it all seemed too remote, too far away for her to do anything to help. With Jack in America she couldn’t do anything more than lend a listening ear to Serena and try to cheer her up as much as possible in the few days they’d be staying here. Serena seemed quite content with that, quite willing, in the days that followed just to trail along with a book or a bit of sewing and sit, not too far off, while Cynthia sketched along the walls of the old city. She proved indeed extremely useful. Her fluent French was a prop for Cynthia’s faltering accents and she had a delightful knack with persuading the children to pose. Cynthia made three excellent portraits, any one of which would do for her monthly cover, then felt free to give her time to sketching the town itself. But wherever they went Aunt Anna either hovered in the background or knew exactly where they would be from half hour to half hour. It was like having a secret service man always in the offing. Serena didn’t mind but Cynthia said it gave her the creeps, always to have Miss Comstock bobbing up like a cuckoo out of a clock, and put up with it only for the sake of the other girl. Meanwhile she heard more about this Jack person. She heard about the color of his eyes and of his hair, about his cleverness and about his family and about his job, which was, at the moment, junior clerk, very junior indeed, in a big real estate office in New Orleans. “He’s got the nicest smile ... you’d think he was cross, really, until he smiles and then it sort of ... flashes across his face,” expatiated Serena. They had been sitting for the past hour in the tourney court, trying to reconstruct the ancient Court of Beauty with its lists; the ground enclosed for the contest, its seats for the great ladies from which the Queen of Beauty was chosen. “I wonder if they called her ‘Miss Carcassonne,’ or ‘Miss France,’” murmured Cynthia to herself. All was quiet here. One could follow, on the ancient walls, the reconstruction of centuries, the lower bricks of Roman tile, small and flat, the higher coarser stone of the tenth century, then above that, still more careful work of later years and finally the deliberately antiqued and weathered rebuilding of the great Viollet-le-Duc, without whose interest and wealth this greatest relic of the middle ages would not exist today. Birds wheeled in the sunlight above them, but the shadow of the wall was cool and the small herd of tourists, whose voices sounded from the tower above them, scarcely left a ripple on the peace of the afternoon.