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+Project Gutenberg Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral, by Marg. Sherwood
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+Daphne, an Autumn Pastoral
+
+by Margaret Sherwood
+
+December, 2000  [Etext #2438]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral, by Marg. Sherwood
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+
+DAPHNE, AN AUTUMN PASTORAL
+
+by Margaret Sherwood
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+"Her Excellency,--will she have the politeness," said Daphne
+slowly, reading from a tiny Italian-English phrase-book, "the
+politeness to"--She stopped helpless.  Old Giacomo gazed at her
+with questioning eyes.  The girl turned the pages swiftly and
+chose another phrase.
+
+"I go," she announced, "I go to make a walk."
+
+Light flashed into Giacomo's face.
+
+"Si, si, Signorina; yes, yes," he assented with voice and
+shoulders and a flourish of the spoon he was polishing.
+"Capisco; I understand."
+
+Daphne consulted her dictionary.
+
+"Down there," she said gravely, pointing toward the top of the
+great hiII on whose side the villa stood.
+
+"Certainly," answered Giacomo with a bow, too much pleased by
+understanding when there was no reason for it to be captious in
+regard to the girl's speech.  "The Signorina non ha paura, not
+'fraid?"
+
+"I'm not afraid of anything," was the answer in English. The
+Italian version of it was a shaking of the head. Then both
+dictionary and phrase-book were consulted.
+
+"To return," she stated finally, "to return to eat at six hours."
+Then she looked expectantly about.
+
+"Assunta?" she said inquiringly, with a slight shrug of her
+shoulders, for other means of expression had failed.
+
+"Capisco, capisco," shouted Giacomo in his excitement, trailing
+on the marble floor the chamois skin with which he had been
+polishing the silver, and speaking in what seemed to his listener
+one word of a thousand
+syllables.
+
+"The-Signorina-goes-to-walk-upon-the-hills-above-the-villa-becaus
+e-it-is-a-most-beautiful-day.-She-returns-to-dine-at-six-and-wish
+es-Assunta-to-have-dinner-prepared.-Perhaps-the-Signorina-would-
+tell-what-she-would-like-for-her-dinner?-A-roast-chicken,-yes?-
+A-salad,-yes?"
+
+Daphne looked dubiously at him, though he had stated the case
+with entire accuracy, and had suggested for her solitary meal
+what she most liked. There was a slight pucker in her white
+forehead, and she vouchsafed no answer to what she did not
+understand.
+
+"Addio, addio," she said earnestly.
+
+"A rivederla!" answered Giacomo, with a courtly sweep of the
+chamois skin.
+
+The girl climbed steadily up the moist, steep path leading to the
+deep shadow of a group of ilex trees on the hill. At her side a
+stream of water trickled past drooping maidenhair fern and over
+immemorial moss. Here and there it fell in little cascades,
+making a sleepy murmur in the warm air of afternoon.
+
+Halfway up the hill Daphne paused and looked back. Below the
+yellow walls of the Villa Accolanti, standing in a wide garden
+with encompassing poplars and cypresses, sketched great grassy
+slopes and gray-green olive orchards.  The water from the stream,
+gathered in a stone basin at the foot of the hill, flowed in a
+marble conduit through the open hall.  As she looked she was
+aware of two old brown faces anxiously gazing after her.  Giacomo
+and Assunta were chattering eagerly in the doorway, the black of
+his butler's dress and the white of his protecting apron making
+his wife's purple calico skirt and red shoulder shawl look more
+gay. They caught the last flutter of the girl's blue linen gown
+as it disappeared among the ilexes.
+
+"E molto bello, very beautiful, the Signorina," remarked Assunta.
+"What gray eyes she has, and how she walks!"
+
+"But she knows no speech," responded her husband.
+
+"Ma che!" shouted Assunta scornfully, "she talks American.  You
+couldn't expect them to speak like us over there.  They are not
+Romans in America."
+
+"My brother Giovanni is there," remarked Giacomo.  "She could
+have learned of him."
+
+"She is like the Contessa," said Assunta.  "You would know they
+are sisters, only this one is younger and has something more
+sweet."
+
+"This one is grave," objected Giacomo as he polished.  "She does
+not smile so much.  The Contessa is gay.  She laughs and sings
+and her cheeks grow red when she drinks red wine, and her hair is
+more yellow."
+
+"She makes it so!" snapped Assunta.
+
+"I have heard they all do in Rome," said Giacomo.  "Some day I
+would like to go to see."
+
+"To go away, to leave this girl here alone with us when she had
+just arrived!"  interrupted Assunta.  "I have no patience with
+the Contessa."
+
+"But wasn't his Highness's father sick?  And didn't she have to
+go?  Else they wouldn't get his money, and all would go to the
+younger brother.  You don't understand these things, you women."
+Giacomo's defense of his lady got into his fingers, and added
+much to the brightness of the spoons.  The two talked together
+now, as fast as human tongues could go.
+
+Assunta.  She could have taken the Signorina.
+
+Giacomo.  She couldn't.  It's fever.
+
+Assunta.  She could have left her maid.
+
+Giacomo.  Thank the holy father she didn't!
+
+Assunta.  And without a word of language to make herself
+understood.
+
+Giacomo.  She can learn, can't she?
+
+Assunta.  And with the cook gone, too!  It's a great task for us.
+
+Giacomo.  You'd better be about it!...  Going walking alone in
+the hills!  And calling me "Excellency."  There's no telling what
+Americans will do.
+
+Assunta.  She didn't know any better.  When she has been here a
+week she won't call you Excellency"!  I must make macaroni for
+dinner.
+
+Giacomo.  Ma che!  Macaroni?  Roast chicken and salad.
+
+Assunta.  Niente!  Macaroni!
+
+Giacomo.  Roast chicken!  You are a pretty one to take the place
+of the cook!
+
+Assunta.  Roast chicken then!  But what are you standing here for
+in the hall polishing spoons?  If the Contessa could see you!
+
+Assunta dragged her husband by the hem of his white apron through
+the great marble-paved dining-room out into the smoke-browned
+kitchen in the rear.
+
+"Now where's Tommaso, and how am I going to get my chicken?" she
+demanded.  "And why, in the name of all the saints, should an
+American signorina's illustrious name be Daphne?"
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+An hour later it was four o'clock.  High, high up among the
+sloping hills Daphne sat on a great gray stone.  Below her, out
+beyond olive orchards and lines of cypress, beyond the distant
+stone pines, stretched the Campagna, rolling in, like the sea
+that it used to be, wave upon wave of color, green here, but
+purple in the distance, and changing every moment with the
+shifting shadows of the floating clouds.  Dome and tower there,
+near the line of shining sea, meant Rome.
+
+Full sense of the enchantment of it all looked out of the girl's
+face.  Wonder sat on her forehead, and on her parted lips.  It
+was a face serious, either with persistent purpose or with some
+momentary trouble, yet full of an exquisite hunger for life and
+light and space.  Eyes and hair and curving cheek,--all the
+girl's sensitive being seemed struggling to accept the gift of
+beauty before her, almost too great to grasp.
+
+"After this," she said half aloud, her far glance resting on Rome
+in the hazy distance, "anything is possible."
+
+"I don't seem real," she added, touching her left hand with the
+forefinger of her right.  "It is Italy, ITALY, and that is Rome.
+Can all this exist within two weeks of the rush and jangle of
+Broadway?"
+
+There was no answer, and she half closed her eyes, intoxicated
+with beauty.
+
+A live thing darted across her foot, and she looked down to catch
+a glimpse of something like a slender green flame licking its way
+through the grass.
+
+"Lizards crawling over me unrebuked," she said smiling.  "Perhaps
+the millenium has come."
+
+She picked two grass blades and a single fern.
+
+They aren't real, you know," she said, addressing herself.  "This
+is all too good to be true.  It will fold up in a minute and move
+away for the next act, and that will be full of tragedy, with an
+ugly background."
+
+The heights still invited.  She rose, and wandered on and up. Her
+step had the quick movement of a dweller in cities, not the slow
+pace of those who linger along country roads, keeping step with
+nature.  In the cut and fashion of her gown was evinced a
+sophistication, and a high seriousness, possibly not her own.
+
+She watched the deep imprint that her footsteps made in the soft
+grass.
+
+"I'm half afraid to step on the earth here," she murmured to
+herself. "It seems to be quivering with old life."
+
+The sun hung lower in the west.  Of its level golden beams were
+born a thousand shades of color on the heights and in the hollows
+of the hills.  Over all the great Campagna blue, yellow, and
+purple blended in an autumn haze.
+
+"Oh!" cried the girl, throwing out her arms to take in the new
+sense of life that came flooding in upon her.  "I cannot take it
+in.  It is too great."
+
+
+As she climbed, a strength springing from sheer delight in the
+wide beauty before her came into her face.
+
+"It was selfish, and I am going to take it back.  To-night I will
+write and say so.  I could face anything now."
+
+This hill, and then the side of that; one more gate, then Daphne
+turned for another look at Rome and the sea.  Rome and the sea
+were gone.  Here was a great olive orchard, there a pasture
+touching the sky, but where was anything belonging to her?
+Somewhere on the hills a lamb was bleating, and near the crickets
+chirped. Yes, it was safe, perfectly safe, yet the blue gown
+moved where the heart thumped beneath it.
+
+A whistle came floating down the valley to her.  It was merry and
+quick, but it struck terror to the girl's breast.  That meant a
+man. She stood and watched, with terrified gray eyes, and
+presently she saw him:  he was crashing through a heavy
+undergrowth of bush and fern not far away.  Daphne gathered her
+skirts in one hand and fled.  She ran as only an athletic girl
+can run, swiftly, gracefully. Her skirt fluttered behind her; her
+soft dark hair fell and floated on the wind.
+
+The whistle did not cease, though the man was motionless now. It
+changed from its melody of sheer joy to wonder, amazement,
+suspense.  It took on soothing tones; it begged, it wheedled.  So
+a mother would whistle, if mothers whistled, over the cradle of a
+crying child, but the girl did not stop.  She was running up a
+hill, and at the top she stood, outlined in blue, against a bluer
+sky.  A moment later she was gone.
+
+Half an hour passed.  Cautiously above the top of the hill
+appeared a girl's head.  She saw what she was looking for:  the
+dreaded man was sitting on the stump of a felled birch tree,
+gazing down the valley, his cheeks resting on his hands.  Daphne,
+stealing behind a giant ilex, studied him.  He wore something
+that looked like a golf suit of brownish shade; a soft felt hat
+drooped over his face. The girl peered out from her hiding place
+cautiously, holding her skirts together to make herself slim and
+small.  It was a choice of evils.  On this side of the hill was a
+man; on that, the whole wide world, pathless.  She was hopelessly
+lost.
+
+"No bad man could whistle like that," thought Daphne, caressingly
+touching with her cheek the tree that protected her.
+
+Once she ventured from her refuge, then swiftly retreated.
+Courage returning, she stepped out on tiptoe and crept softly
+toward the intruder.  She was rehearsing the Italian phrases she
+meant to use.
+
+"Where is Rome?" she asked pleadingly, in the Roman tongue.
+
+The stranger rose, with no sign of being startled, and removed
+his hat.  Then Daphne sighed a great sigh of relief, feeling that
+she was safe.
+
+"Rome," he answered, in a voice both strong and sweet, "Rome has
+perished, and Athens too."
+
+"Oh"--said the girl.  "You speak English.  If you are not a
+stranger here, perhaps you can tell me where the Villa Accolanti
+is."
+
+"I can," he replied, preparing to lead the way.
+
+Daphne looked at him now.  He was different from any person she
+had ever seen.  Face and head belonged to some antique type of
+virile beauty; eyes, hair, and skin seemed all of one golden
+brown. He walked as if his very steps were joyous, and his whole
+personality seemed to radiate an atmosphere of firm content.  The
+girl's face was puzzled as she studied him.  This look of simple
+happiness was not familiar in New York.
+
+They strode on side by side, over the slopes where the girl had
+lost her way.  Every moment added to her sense of trust.
+
+"I am afraid I startled you," she said, "coming up so
+softly."
+
+"No," he answered smiling.  "I knew that you were behind the
+ilex."
+
+"You couldn't see!"
+
+"I have ways of knowing."
+
+He helped her courteously over the one stone wall they had to
+climb, but, though she knew that he was watching her, he made no
+attempt to talk.  At last they reached the ilex grove above the
+villa, and Daphne recognized home.
+
+"I am grateful to you," she said, wondering at this unwonted
+sense of being embarrassed.  "Perhaps, if you will come some day
+to the villa for my sister to thank you"-- The sentence broke
+off.  "I am Daphne Willis," she said abruptly, and waited.
+
+"And I am Apollo," said the stranger gravely.
+
+"Apollo--what?" asked the girl.  Did they use the old names over
+here?
+
+"Phoebus Apollo," he answered, unsmiling.  "Is America so modern
+that you do not know the older gods?"
+
+"Why do you call me an American?"
+
+A smile flickered across Apollo's lips.
+
+"A certain insight goes with being a god."
+
+Daphne started back and looked at him, but the puzzled scrutiny
+did not deepen the color of his brown cheek.  Suddenly she was
+aware that the sunlight had faded, leaving shadow under the
+ilexes and about the fountain on the hill.
+
+"I must say good-night," she said, turning to descend.
+
+He stood watching every motion that she made until she
+disappeared within the yellow walls of the villa.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Through the great open windows of the room night with all her
+stars was shining.  Daphne sat by a carved table in the salon,
+the clear light of a four-flamed Roman lamp falling on her hair
+and hands.  She was writing a letter, and, judging by her
+expression, letter writing was a matter of life and death.
+
+"I am afraid that I was brutal," the wet ink ran.  "Every day on
+the sea told me that.  I was cowardly too."
+
+She stopped to listen to the silence, broken only by the murmur
+of insects calling to each other in the dark.  Suddenly she
+laughed aloud.
+
+"I ought never to have gone so far away," she remarked to the
+night. "What would Aunt Alice say?  Anyway he is a gentleman,
+even if he is a god!"
+
+"For I thought only of myself," the pen continued, "and ignored
+the obligations I had accepted.  It is for you to choose whether
+you wish the words of that afternoon unsaid."
+
+The letter signed and sealed, she rose with a great sigh of
+relief, and walked out upon the balcony.  Overhead was the deep
+blue sky of a Roman night, broken by the splendor of the stars.
+She leaned over the stone railing of the balcony, feeling beneath
+her, beyond the shadow of the cypress trees, the distance and
+darkness of the Campagna.  There was a murmur of water from the
+fountain in the garden, and from the cascades on the hill.
+
+"If he were Apollo," she announced to the listening stars, "it
+would not be a bit more wonderful than the rest of it.  This is
+just a different world, that is all, and who knows whom I shall
+meet next?  Maybe, if I haunt the hills, Diana will come and
+invite me to go a-hunting.  Perhaps if Anna had stayed at home
+this world would seem nearer."
+
+She came back into the salon, but before she knew it, her feet
+were moving to a half-remembered measure, and she found herself
+dancing about the great room in the dim light, the cream-colored
+draperies of her dinner gown moving rhythmically after her.
+Suddenly she stopped short, realizing that her feet were keeping
+pace with the whistling of this afternoon, the very notes that
+had terrified her while the stranger was unseen.  She turned her
+attention to a piece of tapestry on the wall, tracing the faded
+pattern with slim fingers.  For the twentieth time her eyes
+wandered to the mosaic floor, to the splendid, tarnished mirrors
+on the walls, to the carved chairs and table legs, wrought into
+cunning patterns of leaf and stem.
+
+"Oh, it is all perfect! and I've got it all to myself!" she
+exclaimed.
+
+Then she seated herself at the table again and began another
+letter.
+
+
+
+Padre mio,--It is an enchanted country!  You never saw such
+beauty of sky and grass and trees.  These cypresses and poplars
+seem to have been standing against the blue sky from all
+eternity; time is annihilated, and the gods of Greece and Rome
+are wandering about the hills.
+
+Anna has gone away.  Her father-in-law is very ill, and naturally
+Count Accolanti is gone too.  Even the cook has departed, because
+of a family crisis of his own.  I am here with the butler and his
+wife to take care of me, and I am perfectly safe.  Don't be
+alarmed, and don't tell Aunt Alice that the elaborate new gowns
+will have no spectators save two Roman peasants and possibly a
+few sheep. Anna wanted to send me an English maid from Rome, but
+l begged with tears, and she let me off.  Assunta is all I need.
+She and Giacomo are the real thing, peasants, and absolutely
+unspoiled. They have never been five miles away from the estate,
+and I know they have all kinds of superstitions and beliefs that
+go with the soil.  I shall find them out when I can understand.
+At present we converse with eyes and fingers, for our six weeks'
+study of Italian has not brought me knowledge enough to order my
+dinner.
+
+Padre carissimo, I've written to Eustace to take it all back.  I
+am afraid you won't like it, for you seemed pleased when it was
+broken off, but I was unkind and I am sorry, and I want to make
+amends.  You really oughtn't to disapprove of a man, you know,
+just because he wants altar candles and intones the service.  And
+I think his single-minded devotion is beautiful.  You do not know
+what a refuge it has been to me through all Aunt Alice's
+receptions and teas.
+
+Do leave New York, and come and live with me near ancient Rome.
+We can easily slip back two thousand years.
+
+I am your spoiled daughter, Daphne
+
+
+There was a knock at the door.
+
+"Avanti," called the girl.
+
+Assunta entered, with a saffron-colored night-cap on.  In her
+hand she held Giacomo's great brass watch, and she pointed in
+silence to the face, which said twelve o'clock.  She put watch
+and candle on the table, marched to the windows, and closed and
+bolted them all.
+
+"The candles are lighted in the Signorina's bedroom," she
+remarked.
+
+"Thank you," said Daphne, who did not understand a word.
+
+"The bed is prepared, and the night things are put out."
+
+"Yes?" answered Daphne, smiling.
+
+"The hot water will be at the door at eight in the morning."
+
+"So many thanks!" murmured Daphne, not knowing what favor was
+bestowed, but knowing that if it came from Assunta it was good.
+
+"Good-night, Signorina."
+
+The girl's face lighted.  She understood that.
+
+"Good-night," she answered, in the Roman tongue.
+
+Assunta muttered to herself as she lighted her way with her
+candle down the long hall.
+
+"Molto intelligente, la Signorina!  Only here three days, and
+already understands all."
+
+"You don't need speech here," said Daphne, pulling aside the
+curtains of her tapestried bed a little later.  "The Italians can
+infer all you mean from a single smile."
+
+Down the road a peasant was merrily beating his donkey to the
+measure of the tune on his lips.  Listening, and turning over
+many questions in her mind, Daphne fell asleep.  A flood of
+sunshine awakened her in the morning, and she realized that
+Assunta was drawing the window curtains.
+
+"Assunta," asked the girl, sitting up in bed and rubbing her
+eyes, "are there many Americans here?"
+
+"Si," answered Assunta, "very many."
+
+"And many English?"
+
+"Too many," said Assunta.
+
+"Young ones?" asked the girl.
+
+Assunta shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Young men?" inquired Daphne.
+
+The peasant woman looked sharply at her, then smiled.
+
+"I saw one man yesterday," said Daphne, her forehead puckered
+painfully in what Assunta mistook for a look of fear.  Her
+carefully prepared phrases could get no nearer the problem she
+wished solved.
+
+"Ma che!  agnellina mia, my little lamb!" cried the peasant
+woman, grasping Daphne's hand in order to kiss her fingers, "you
+are safe, safe with us.  No Americans nor English shall dare to
+look at the Signorina in the presence of Giacomo and me."
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+lt was not a high wall, that is, not very high.  Many a time in
+the country Daphne had climbed more formidable ones, and there
+was no reason why she should not try this.  No one was in sight
+except a shepherd, watching a great flock of sheep.  There was a
+forgotten rose garden over in that field; had Caesar planted it,
+or Tiberius, centuries ago?  Certainly no one had tended it for a
+thousand years or two, and the late pink roses grew unchecked.
+Daphne slowly worked her way to the top of the wall; this close
+masonry made the proceeding more difficult than it usually was at
+home.  She stood for a moment on the summit, glorying in the
+widened view, then sprang, with the lightness of a kitten, to the
+other side.  There was a skurry of frightened sheep, and then a
+silence.
+
+She knew that she was sitting on the grass, and that her left
+wrist pained.  Some one was coming toward her.
+
+"Are you hurt?" asked Apollo anxiously.
+
+"Not at all," she answered, continuing to sit on the grass.
+
+"lf you were hurt, where would it be?"
+
+"In my wrist," said the girl, with a little groan.
+
+The questioner kneeled beside her, and Daphne gave a start of
+surprise that was touched with fear.
+
+"It isn't you?" she stammered.  "You aren't the shepherd?"
+
+A sheepskin coat disguised him.  The rough hat was of soft
+drooping felt, like that of any shepherd watching on the hills,
+and in his hand he held a crook.  An anxious mother-sheep was
+sniffing eagerly at his pockets, remembering gifts of
+salt.
+
+"Apollo was a shepherd," said Daphne slowly, with wonder in her
+face.  "He kept the flocks of King Admetus."
+
+"You seem to be well read in the classical dictionary," remarked
+the stranger, with twinkling eyes.  "You have them in America
+then?"
+
+He was examining her wrist with practiced fingers, touching it
+firmly here and there.
+
+"We have everything in America," said the girl, eyeing him
+dubiously.
+
+"But no gods except money, I have heard."
+
+"Yes, gods, and impostors too," she answered significantly.
+
+"So I have heard," said Apollo, with composure.
+
+The maddening thing was that she could not look away from him--
+some radiance of life in his face compelled her eyes.  He had
+thrown his hat upon the grass, and the girl could see strength
+and sweetness and repose in every line of forehead, lip, and
+chin. There was pride there, too, and with it a slight leaning
+forward of the head.
+
+"I presume that comes from listening to beseeching prayers," she
+was thinking to herself.
+
+"Ow!" she remarked suddenly.
+
+"That is the place, is it?"
+
+He drew from one of the pockets of the grotesque coat a piece of
+sheepskin, which he proceeded to cut into two strips with his
+knife.
+
+"It seems to be a very slight sprain," remarked Apollo.  "I must
+bandage it.  Have you any pins about you?"
+
+"Can the gods lack pins?" asked the girl, smiling.  She searched,
+and found two in her belt, and handed them to him.
+
+"The gods do not explain themselves," he answered, binding the
+sheepskin tightly about her wrist.
+
+"So I observe," she remarked dryly.
+
+"Is that right?" he asked.  "Now, when you reach home, you must
+remove the bandage and hold your hand and wrist first in very hot
+water, then in cold.  Is there some one who can put the bandage
+back as I have it?  See, it simply goes about the wrist, and is
+rather tight.  You must pardon my taking possession of the case,
+but no one else was near.  Apollo has always been something of a
+physician, you know."
+
+"You apparently used the same classical dictionary that I did,"
+retorted Daphne.  "I remember the statement there."
+
+Then she became uncomfortable, and wished her words unsaid, for
+awe had come upon her.  After all, nothing could be more unreal
+than she was to herself in these days of wonder.  Her mind was
+full of dreams as they sat and watched white clouds drifting over
+the deep blue of the sky.  Near them the sheep were cropping
+grass, and all the rest was silence.
+
+"You look anxious," said the physician.  "Is it the
+wrist?"
+
+"No," answered the girl, facing him bravely, under the momentary
+inspiration of a wave of common sense, "I am wondering why you
+make this ridiculous assumption about yourself.  Tell me who you
+really are."
+
+If he had defended himself she would have argued, but he was
+silent and she half believed.
+
+"But you look like a mortal," she protested, answering her own
+thoughts.  "And you wear conventional clothing.  I don't mean
+this sheepskin, but the other day."
+
+"It is a realistic age," he answered, smiling.  "People no longer
+believe what they do not see.  We are forced to adopt modern
+methods and modern costume to show that we exist."
+
+"You do not look like the statue of Apollo," ventured
+Daphne.
+
+"Did people ever dare tell the truth about the gods?  Never!
+They made up a notion of what a divine nose should be and
+bestowed it upon all the gods impartially.  So with the forehead,
+so with the hair.  I assure you, Miss Willis, we are much more
+individual than Greek art would lead you to expect."
+
+"Do you mind just telling me why you are keeping sheep now?"
+
+"I will, if you will promise not to consider a question of mine
+impertinent."
+
+"What is the question?"
+
+"I only wished to know why an American young lady should bear a
+Greek name?  It is a beautiful name, and one that is a favorite
+of mine as you may know."
+
+"I didn't know," said Daphne.  "It was given me by my father.  He
+was born in America, but he had a Greek soul.  He has always
+longed to live in Greece, but he has to go on preaching,
+preaching, for he is a rector, you know, in a little church in
+New York, that isn't very rich, though it is very old.  All his
+life he has been hungry for the beauty and the greatness of the
+world over here."
+
+"That accounts for your expression," observed Apollo.
+
+"What expression?"
+
+"That isn't the question I promised to answer.  If you will take
+a few steps out of your way, I can satisfy you in regard to the
+first one you asked."
+
+He rose, and the white shepherd dog sprang ahead, barking
+joyously. The sheep looked up and nibbled in anxious haste,
+fearing that any other bit of pasture might be less juicy than
+this.  Daphne followed the shepherd god to a little clump of oak
+trees, where she saw a small, rough gray tent, perhaps four feet
+in height. Under it, on brown blankets, lay a bearded man, whose
+eyes lighted at Apollo's approach.  A blue bowl with a silver
+spoon in it stood on the ground near his head, and a small heap
+of charred sticks with an overhanging kettle showed that cooking
+had been done there.
+
+"The shepherd has a touch of fever," explained the guide.
+"Meanwhile, somebody must take care of the sheep.  I am glad to
+get back my two occupations as shepherd and physician at the same
+time."
+
+The dog and his master accompanied her part way down the hill,
+and the girl was silent, for her mind was busy, revolving many
+thoughts.  At the top of the last height above the villa she
+stopped and looked at her companion.  The sun was setting, and a
+golden haze filled the air.  It ringed with light the figure
+before her, standing there, the face, with its beauty of color,
+and its almost insolent joyousness, rising above the rough
+sheepskin coat.
+
+"Who are you?" she gasped, terrified.  "Who are you, really?" The
+confused splendor dazzled her eyes, and she turned and ran
+swiftly down the hill.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+"A man is ill," observed Daphne, in the Roman tongue.
+
+"What?" demanded Giacomo.
+
+"A man is ill," repeated Daphne firmly.  She had written it out,
+and she knew that it was right.
+
+"Her mind wanders," Giacomo hinted to his wife.
+
+"No, no, no!  It's the Signorina herself," cried Assunta, whose
+wits were quicker than her husband's.  "She is saying that she is
+ill.  What is it, Signorina mia?  Is it your head, or your back,
+or your stomach?  Are you cold?  Have you fever?"
+
+"Si," answered Daphne calmly.  The answer that usually quieted
+Assunta failed now.  Then she tried the smile.  That also failed.
+
+"Tell me," pleaded Assunta, speaking twice as fast as usual, in
+order to move the Signorina's wits to quicker understanding. "If
+the Signorina is ill the Contessa will blame me.  It is measles
+perhaps; Sor Tessa's children have it in the village."  She felt
+of the girl's forehead and pulse, and stood more puzzled than
+before.
+
+"The Signorina exaggerates, perhaps?" she remarked in
+question.
+
+"Thank you!" said Daphne beseechingly.
+
+That was positively her last shot, and if it missed its aim she
+knew not what to do.  She saw that the two brown faces before her
+were full of apprehension, and she came back to her original
+proposition.
+
+"A man is ill."
+
+The faces were blank.  Daphne hastily consulted her phrase-book.
+
+"I wish food," she remarked glibly.  "I wish soup, and fish, and
+red wine and white, and everything included, tutto compreso."
+
+The brown eyes lighted; these were more familiar terms.
+
+"Now?" cried Assunta and Giacomo in one breath, "at ten o'clock
+in the morning?"
+
+"Si," answered Daphne firmly, "please, thank you."  And she
+disappeared.
+
+An hour later they summoned her, and looked at her in
+bewilderment when she entered the dining-room with her hat on.
+Giacomo stood ready for service, and the Signorina's soup was
+waiting on the table.
+
+The girl laughed when she saw it.
+
+"Per me?  No," she said, touching her dress with her finger; "for
+him, up there," and she pointed upward.
+
+Giacomo shook his head and groaned, for his understanding was
+exhausted.
+
+"I go to carry food to the man who is ill," recited Daphne, her
+foot tapping the floor in impatience.  She thrust her phrase-book
+out toward Giacomo, but he shook his head again, being one whose
+knowledge was superior to the mere accomplishment of reading.
+
+Daphne's short skirt and red felt hat disappeared in the kitchen.
+Presently she returned with Assunta and a basket.  The two
+understood her immediate purpose now, however bewildering the
+ultimate.  They packed the basket with a right good will:  red
+wine in a transparent flask, yellow soup in a shallow pitcher,
+bread, crisp lettuce, and thin slices of beef.  Then Daphne gave
+the basket to Giacomo and beckoned him to come after her.
+
+He climbed behind his lady up the narrow path by the waterfalls
+through damp grass and trickling fern, then up the great green
+slope toward the clump of oak trees.  By the low gray tent they
+halted, and Giacomo's expression changed.  He had not understood
+the Signorina, he said hastily, and he begged the Signorina's
+pardon.  She was good, she was gracious.
+
+"Speak to him," said Daphne impatiently; "go in, give him food."
+
+He lifted the loose covering that served as the side of a tent,
+and found the sick man.  Giacomo chattered, his brown fingers
+moving swiftly by way of punctuation.  The sick man chattered,
+too, his fingers moving more slowly in their weakness.  Giacomo
+seemed excited by what he heard, and Daphne, watching from a
+little distance, wondered if fever must not increase under the
+influence of tongues that wagged so fast.  She strolled away,
+picking tiny, pink-tipped daisies and blue succory blossoms
+growing in the moist green grass.  From high on a distant
+hillside, among his nibbling sheep, the shepherd
+watched.
+
+Giacomo presently stopped talking and fed the invalid the soup
+and part of the wine he had brought.  He knew too much, as a wise
+Italian, to give a sick man bread and beef.  Then he made
+promises of blankets, and of more soup to-morrow, tucked the
+invalid up again, and prepared to go home.  On the way down the
+hill he was explosive in his excitement; surely the Signorina
+must understand such vehement words.
+
+"The sheep are Count Gianelli's sheep," he shouted.  "I knew the
+sheep before, and there isn't a finer flock on the hills.  This
+man is from Ortalo, a day's journey.  The Signorina understands?"
+
+She smiled, the reassuring smile that covers ignorance.  Then she
+came nearer, and bent her tall head to listen.
+
+"His name is Antoli," said Giacomo, speaking more distinctly.
+"Four days ago he fell ill with fever and with chills.  He lay on
+the ground among the sheep, for he had only his blanket that the
+shepherds use at night.  The sheep nibbled close to him, and
+touched his face with their tongues, and bit off hairs from his
+head as they cropped the grass, but they did not care.  Sheep
+never do!  Ah, how a dog cares!  The Signorina wishes to hear the
+rest?"
+
+Daphne nodded eagerly, for she had actually understood several
+sentences.
+
+"The second day he felt a warm tongue licking his face, and there
+were paws on his breast as he waked from sleep.  It was a white
+dog.  He opened his eyes, and there before him was a Signorino,
+young, beautiful as a god, in a suit of brown.  Since then Antoli
+has wanted nothing, food, nor warm covering, nor medicine, nor
+kind words.  The Signorino wears his sheepskin coat and tends his
+sheep!"
+
+Giacomo's voice was triumphant with delight as he pointed toward
+the distant flock with the motionless attendant.  The girl's face
+shone, half in pleasure, half in fear.  "Beautiful as a god" was
+more like the Italian she had read in her father's study in New
+York than were the phrases Giacomo and Assunta employed for every
+day.  She had comprehended all of her companion's excitement, and
+many of his words, for much of the story was already hers.
+
+"Giacomo," she said, speaking slowly, "are the gods here yet?"
+
+The old peasant looked at her with cunning eyes, and made with
+his fingers the sign of the horn that wards off evil.
+
+"Chi lo sa?  Who knows, Signorina?" he said, half whispering.
+"There are stories--I have heard--the Signorina sees these ilex
+trees?  Over yonder was a great one in my father's day, and the
+old Count Accolanti would have it cut.  He came to watch it as it
+fell, and the tree tumbled the wrong way and struck him so that
+he half lost his wits.  There are who say that the tree god was
+angry. And I have heard about the streams, too, Signorina; when
+they are turned out of their course, they overflow and do damage,
+and surely there used to be river gods.  I do not know; I cannot
+tell. The priest says they are all gone since the coming of our
+Lord, but I wouldn't, not for all the gold in Rome, I wouldn't
+see this stream of the waterfalls turned away from flowing down
+the hill and through the house.  What there is in it I do not
+know, but in some way it is alive."
+
+"Thank you!" said Daphne.  The look on her face pleased the old
+man.
+
+"I think I prefer her to the Contessa after all," said Giacomo
+that afternoon to Assunta as he was beating the salad dressing
+for dinner.
+
+"She is simpatica!  It is wonderful how she understands, though
+she cannot yet talk much.  But her eyes speak."
+
+They served her dinner with special care that night, for kindness
+to an unfortunate fellow peasant had won what still needed
+winning of their hearts.  She sat alone in the great dining-hall,
+with Giacomo moving swiftly about her on the marble floor.  On
+the white linen and silver, on her face and crimson gown, gleamed
+the light of many candles, standing in old-fashioned branching
+candlesticks.  She pushed away her soup; it seemed an intrusion.
+Not until she heard Giacomo's murmur of disappointment as she
+refused salad did she rouse herself to do justice to the dressing
+he had made.  Her eyes were the eyes of one living in a dream.
+Suddenly she wakened to the fact that she was hungry, and Giacomo
+grinned as she asked him to bring back the roast, and let him
+fill again with cool red wine the slender glass at her right
+hand. When the time for dessert came, she lifted a bunch of
+purple grapes and put them on her plate, breaking them off slowly
+with fingers that got stained.
+
+"I shall wake up by and by!" she said, leaning back in her carved
+Florentine chair.  "Only I hope it may be soon.  Otherwise," she
+added, nibbling a bit of ginger, unconscious that her figures
+were mixed, "I shall forget my way back to the world."
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+There were two weeks of golden days.  The sun rose clear over the
+green hills behind the villa, and dropped at night into the blue
+sea the other side of Rome.  Daphne counted off the minutes in
+pulse beats that were actual pleasure.  Between box hedges, past
+the clusters of roses, chrysanthemums, and dahlias in the villa
+garden, she walked, wondering that she had never known before
+that the mere crawling of the blood through the veins could mean
+joy.  She was utterly alone, solitary, speechless; there were
+moments when the thought of her sister's present trouble, and of
+the letter she was expecting from New York, would take the color
+from the sky; but no vexatious thought could long resist the
+enchantment of this air, and she forgot to be unhappy.  She saw
+no more of the shepherd god, but always she was conscious of a
+presence in the sunshine on the hills.
+
+On the eighth morning, as she paced the garden walks, a lizard
+scampered from her path, and she chased it as a five year old
+child might have done.  A slim cypress tree stood in her way; she
+grasped it in her arms, and held it, laying her cheek against it
+as if it were a friend.  Some new sense was dawning in her of
+kinship with branch and flower.  She was forgetting how to think;
+she was Daphne, the Greek maiden, whose life was half the life of
+a tree.
+
+When she took her arms from the tree she saw that he was there,
+looking at her from over the hedge, with the golden brown lights
+in eyes and hair, and the smile that had no touch of amusement in
+it, only of happiness.
+
+"Sometimes," he murmured, "you remind me of Hebe, but on the
+whole, I think you are more like my sister Diana."
+
+"Tell me about Diana," begged Daphne, coming near the hedge and
+putting one hand on the close green leaves.
+
+"We were great friends as children," observed Apollo.  "It was I
+who taught her how to hunt, and we used to chase each other in
+the woods.  When I went faster then she did, she used to get
+angry and say she would not play.  Oh, those were glorious
+mornings, when the light was clear at dawn!"
+
+"Why are you here?" asked Daphne abruptly, "and, if you will
+excuse me, where did you come from?"
+
+"Surely you have heard about the gods being exiled from Greece!
+We wander, for the world has cast us out.  Some day they will
+need us again, and will pluck the grass from our shrines, and
+then we shall come back to teach them."
+
+"Teach them what?" asked the girl.  She could make out nothing
+from the mystery of that face, and besides, she did not dare to
+look too closely.
+
+"I should teach them joy," he answered simply.
+
+They were so silent, looking at each other over the dark green
+hedge, that the lizards crept back in the sunshine close to their
+feet.  Daphne's blue gown and smooth dark hair were outlined
+against the deep green of her cypress tree.  A grapevine that had
+grown about the tree threw the shadow of delicate leaf and
+curling tendril on her pale cheek and scarlet lips.  The
+expression of the heathen god as he looked at her denoted entire
+satisfaction.
+
+"I know what you would teach them," she said slowly.  "You would
+show them how to ignore suffering and pain.  You would turn your
+back on need.  Oh, that makes me think that I have forgotten to
+take your friend Antoli any soup lately!  For three days I took
+it, and then, and then--I have been worried about things."
+
+His smile was certainly one of amusement now.
+
+"You must pardon me for seeming to change the subject," he said.
+"Why should you worry?  There is nothing in life worth worrying
+about."
+
+Fine scorn crept into the girl's face.
+
+"No," he continued, answering her expression.  "I don't ignore. I
+am glad because I have chosen to be glad, and because I have won
+my content.  There is a strenuous peace for those who can fight
+their way through to it."
+
+Suddenly, through the beauty of his color, the girl saw, graven
+as with a fine tool upon his face, a story of grief mastered.  In
+the lines of chin and mouth and forehead it lurked there, half
+hidden by his smile.
+
+"Tell me," said Daphne impulsively.  Her hand moved nearer on the
+hedge, but she did not know it.  He shook his head, and the veil
+dropped again.
+
+"Why tell?" he asked.  "Isn't there present misery enough before
+our eyes always, without remembering the old?"
+
+She only gazed at him, with a puzzled frown on her forehead.
+
+"So you think it is your duty to worry?" he asked, the joyous
+note coming back into his voice.
+
+Daphne broke into a smile.
+
+"I suppose I do," she confessed.  "And it's so hard here.  I keep
+forgetting."
+
+"Why do you want to remember?"
+
+"It is so selfish not to."
+
+He nodded, with an air of ancient wisdom.
+
+"I have lived on this earth more years than you have, some
+thousands, you remember, and I can assure you that more people
+forget their fellows because of their own troubles than because
+of their own joys."
+
+The girl pulled at a tendril of the vine with her fingers, eyeing
+her companion keenly.
+
+"I presume," she said, with a tremor in her voice, "that you are
+an Englishman, or an American who has studied Greek thought
+deeply, being tired of modern people and modern ways, and that
+you are trying to get back to an older, simpler way of
+living."
+
+"It has ever been the custom," said Apollo, gently taking the
+tendril of the vine from her fingers, "for a nation to refuse to
+believe the divinity of the others' gods."
+
+"Anyway," mused the girl, not quite conscious that she was
+speaking aloud, "whatever you think, you are good to the
+shepherd."
+
+He laughed outright.
+
+"I find that most people are better than their beliefs," he
+answered.  "Now, Miss Willis, I wonder if I dare ask you
+questions about the way of living that has brought you to believe
+in the divine efficacy of unhappiness."
+
+"My father is a clergyman," answered the girl, with a smile.
+
+"Exactly!" said the heathen god.
+
+"We have lived very quietly, in one of the streets of older New
+York.  I won't tell you the number, for of course it would not
+mean anything to you."
+
+"Of course not," said Apollo.
+
+"He is rector of a queer little old-fashioned church that has
+existed since the days of Washington.  It is quaint and
+irregular, and I am very fond of it."
+
+"It isn't the Little Church of All the Saints?" demanded her
+companion.
+
+"It is.  How did you know?"
+
+"Divination," he answered.
+
+"Oh!" said Daphne.  "Why don't you divine the rest?"
+
+"I should rather hear you tell it, if you don't mind."
+
+"I have studied with my father a great deal," she went on.  "And
+then, there have been a great many social things, for I have an
+aunt who entertains a great deal, and she always needs me to help
+her.  That has been fun, too."
+
+"Then it has been religion and dinners," he summarized
+briefly.
+
+"It has."
+
+"With a Puritan ancestry, I suppose?"
+
+"For a god," murmured Daphne, "it seems to me you know a great
+deal too much about some things, and not enough about others."
+
+"I have brought you something," he said, suddenly changing the
+subject.
+
+He lifted the sheepskin coat and held out to her a tiny lamb,
+whose heavy legs hung helpless, and whose skin shone pink through
+the little curls of wool.  The girl stretched out her arms and
+gathered the little creature in them.
+
+"A warm place to lie, and warm milk are what it needs," he said.
+"It was born out of its time, and its mother lies dead on the
+hills. Spring is for birth, not autumn."
+
+Daphne watched him as he went back to his sheep, then turned
+toward the house.  Giacomo and Assunta saw her coming in her blue
+dress between the beds of flowers with the lambkin in her arms.
+
+"Like our Lady!" said Assunta, hurrying to the rescue.
+
+The two brown ones asked no questions, possibly because of the
+difficulty of conversing with the Signorina, possibly from some
+profounder reason.
+
+"Maybe the others do not see him," thought the girl in
+perplexity. "Maybe I dream him, but this lamb is real."
+
+She sat in the sun on the marble steps of the villa, the lamb on
+her lap.  A yellow bowl of milk stood on the floor, close to the
+little white head that dangled from her blue knee.  Daphne,
+acting on Assunta's directions, curled one little finger under
+the milk and offered the tip of it to the lamb to suck.  He
+responded eagerly, and so she wheedled him into forgetfulness of
+his dead mother.
+
+An hour later, as she paced the garden paths, a faint bleat
+sounded at the hem of her skirt, and four unsteady legs supported
+a weak little body that tumbled in pursuit of her.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Up the long smooth road that lay by the walls of the villa came
+toiling a team of huge grayish oxen, with monstrous spreading
+horns tied with blue ribbons.  The cart that they drew was filled
+with baskets loaded with grapes, and a whiff of their fragrance
+smote Daphne's nostrils as she walked on the balcony in the
+morning air.
+
+"Assunta, Assunta!" she cried, leaning over the gray, moss-coated
+railing, "what is it?"
+
+Assunta was squatting on the ground in the garden below, digging
+with a blunt knife at the roots of a garden fern.  There was a
+gray red cotton shawl over her head, and a lilac apron upon her
+knees.
+
+"It's the vintage, Signorina," she answered, "the wine makes
+itself."
+
+"Everything does itself in this most lazy country," remarked
+Daphne. "Dresses make themselves, boots repair themselves, food
+eats itself. There's just one idiom, si fa,"--
+
+"What?" asked Assunta.
+
+"Reflections," answered the girl, smiling down on her.  "Assunta,
+may I go and help pick grapes?"
+
+"Ma che!" screamed the peasant woman, losing her balance in her
+sudden emotion and going down on her knees in the loosened soil.
+
+"The Signorina, the sister of the Contessa, go to pick grapes in
+the vineyard?"
+
+"Si'" answered Daphne amiably.  Her face was alive with laughter.
+
+"But the Contessa would die of shame!" asserted Assunta, rising
+with bits of dirt clinging to her apron, and gesticulating with
+the knife.  "It would be a scandal, and all the pickers would
+say, 'Behold the mad English-Woman!'"
+
+She looked up beseechingly at her mistress.  She and Giacomo
+never could tell beforehand which sentences the Signorina was
+going to understand.
+
+"Come with me!" coaxed the girl.
+
+"But does the Signorina want to"--
+
+"I want everything!" Daphne interrupted.  "Grapes and flowers and
+wine and air and sunshine.  I want to see and feel and taste and
+touch and smell everything there is.  The days are too short to
+take it all in.  Hurry!"
+
+As most of this outburst was in English, Assunta could do nothing
+but look up with an air of deepened reproach.  Daphne disappeared
+from the railing, and a minute later was at Assunta's
+side.
+
+"Come, come, come!" she cried, pulling her by the lilac apron.
+"Our time is brief, and we must gather rosebuds while we may. I
+am young and you are old, and neither of us has any time to
+lose."
+
+Before she knew it, Assunta was trotting meekly down the road at
+the young lady's heels, carrying a great flat basket for the
+Signorina's use in picking grapes.
+
+They were bound for the lower slopes; the grapes ripened earlier
+there, the peasant woman explained, and the frosts came later.
+The loaded wagons that they met were going to Arata, a wine press
+in the valley beyond this nearest hill.  Perhaps the Signorina
+would like to go there to see the new wine foaming in the vat?
+Strangers often went to see this.
+
+Daphne's blood went singing through her veins with some new sense
+of freedom and release, for the gospel of this heathen god was
+working in her pulses.  Wistfully her eyes wandered over the
+lovely slopes with their clothing of olive and of vine, and up
+and down the curling long white roads.  At some turning of the
+way, or at some hilltop where the road seemed to touch the blue
+sky, surely she would see him coming with that look of divine
+content upon his face!
+
+Suddenly she realized that they were inside the vineyard walls,
+for fragrance assailed her nostrils, fragrance of ripened grapes,
+of grapes crushed under foot as the swift pickers went snipping
+the full purple bunches with their shears.
+
+"I shall see Bacchus coming next," she said to herself, but
+hoping that it would not be Bacchus.  "He will go singing down
+the hill with the Maenads behind him, with fluttering hair and
+draperies."
+
+It was not nearly so picturesque as she had hoped, she confessed
+to herself, as her thoughts came down to their customary level.
+The vineyard of her dreams, with its long, trailing vines, was
+not found in this country; there were only close-clipped plants
+trained to stakes.  But there was a sound of talking and of
+laughter, and the pickers, moving among the even lines in their
+gay rags, lent motley color to the picture.  There was scarlet of
+waistcoat or of petticoat, blue and saffron of jacket and apron,
+and a blending of all bright tints in the kerchiefs above the
+hair. The rich dark soil made a background for it all:  the
+moving figures, the clumps of pale green vine leaves, the great
+baskets of piled-up grapes.
+
+Assunta was chattering eagerly with a young man who smiled, and
+took off his hat to the Signorina, and said something polite,
+with a show of white teeth.  Daphne did not know what it was, but
+she took the pair of scissors that were given her, and began to
+cut bunch after bunch of grapes.  If she had realized that the
+peasant woman, her heart full of shame, had confessed to the
+overseer her young lady's whim, and had won permission for her to
+join the ranks of the pickers, she might have been less happy.
+As it was, she noticed nothing, but diligently cut her grapes,
+piling them, misty with bloom, flecked with gold sunlights, in
+her basket.  Then she found a flat stone and sat on it, watching
+the workers and slowly eating a great bunch of grapes.  She had
+woven green leaves into the cord of her red felt hat; the
+peasants as they passed smiled back to her in swift recognition
+of her friendliness and charm.
+
+Her thoughts flamed up within her with sudden anger at herself.
+This vivid joy in the encompassing beauty had but one meaning: it
+was her sense of the glad presence of this new creature, man or
+god, who seemed continually with her, were he near or far.
+
+"I'm as foolish as a sixteen-year-old girl," she murmured,
+fingering the grapes in the basket with their setting of green
+leaves, "and yet, and yet he isn't a man, really; he is only a
+state of mind!"
+
+She sat, with the cool air of autumn on her cheeks, watching the
+pickers, who went with even motion up the great slope. Sometimes
+there was silence on the hillside; now and then there was a
+fragment of song.  One gay, tripping air, started by three women
+who stood idle with arms akimbo for a moment on the hillside, was
+caught up and echoed back by invisible singers on the other side
+of the hill.  And once the red-cheeked Italian lads who were
+carrying loaded baskets down toward the vineyard gates burst into
+responsive singing that made her think that she had found, on the
+Roman hills, some remnant of the old Bacchic music, of the
+alternate strains that marked the festival of the god of wine.
+It was something like this:--
+
+Carlo.  "Of all the gifts of all the gods I choose the ruddy
+wine. The brimming glass shall be my lot"--
+
+Giovanni (interrupting).  "Carlotta shall be mine! "Take you the
+grape, I only ask The shadow of the vine To screen Carlotta's
+golden head"--
+
+Carlo (interrupting).  "Give me the ruddy wine."
+
+Together. G.  "Carlotta shall be mine!" C.  "Give me the ruddy
+wine!"
+
+
+Assunta was visibly happy when the Signorina signified her
+willingness to go home.  The pride of the house servant was
+touched by being compelled to come too closely in contact with
+the workers in the fields, and where is there pride like that of
+a peasant?  But her joy was short-lived.  Outside the great iron
+gates stood a team of beautiful fawn-colored oxen, with spotless
+flanks, and great, blue, patient eyes looking out from under
+broad foreheads.  They were starting, with huge muscles quivering
+under their white skin, to carry a load of grapes to the wine
+press, the yield of this year being too great for the usual
+transportation on donkey back.
+
+"Assunta, I go too," cried Daphne.
+
+Five minutes later the Signorina, with her unwilling handmaid at
+her side, rode in triumph up the broad highway with the measured
+motion of slow oxen feet.  Place had been made for them among the
+grape baskets, and they sat on folded blankets, Assunta's face
+wearing the expression of one who was a captive indeed, the
+Signorina's shining with simple happiness and somewhat stained by
+grapes.
+
+The wine press was nothing after all but a machine, and though a
+certain interest attached to the great vats, hollowed out in the
+tufa rock, into which the new-made wine trickled, Daphne soon
+signified her willingness to depart.  Before she left they
+brought her a great glass of rich red grape juice fresh from the
+newly crushed grapes.  She touched her lips to it, then looked
+about her.  Assunta was talking to the workman who had given it
+to her, and he was looking the other way.  She feasted her eyes
+on the color of the thing she held in her hand.  It was a rough
+glass whose shallow bowl had the old Etruscan curves of beauty,
+and the crimson wine caught the sunlight in a thousand ways.
+Bending over, she poured it out slowly on the green grass.
+
+"A libation to Apollo," she said, not without reverence.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"I shall call you," said Daphne to the lamb on the fourth day of
+his life with her, "I shall call you Hermes, because you go so
+fast."
+
+Very fast indeed he went.  By garden path, or on the slopes below
+the villa, he followed her with swift gallop, interrupted by many
+jumps and gambols, and much frisking of his tail.  If he lost
+himself in his wayward pursuit of his mistress, a plaintive bleat
+summoned her to his side.  On the marble stairs of the villa,
+even in the sacred precincts of the salon, she heard the tinkle
+of his hard little hoofs, and she had no courage to turn him
+back.  He bleated so piteously outside the door when his lady
+dined that at last he won the desire of his heart and lapped milk
+from a bowl on the floor at her side as she ate her salad or
+broke her grapes.
+
+"What scandal!" muttered Giacomo every time he brought the bowl.
+The Contessa would discharge him if she knew!  But he always
+remembered, even if Daphne forgot, and meekly dried the milk from
+his sleek black trousers whenever Hermes playfully dashed his
+hoof, instead of his nose, into the bowl.  As Giacomo explained
+to Assunta in the kitchen, it was for the Signorina, and the
+Signorina was very lonely.
+
+She was less lonely with Hermes, for he spoke her language.
+
+"It is almost time to hear from Eustace," Daphne told him one
+day, as she sat on a stone under an olive tree in the orchard
+below the house.  Hermes stood before her, his head down, his
+tail dejectedly drooped.
+
+"Perhaps," she added, dreamily looking up at the blue sky through
+its broken veil of gray-green olive leaves, "perhaps he does not
+want me back, and the letter will tell me so."
+
+Hermes gave an incredible jump high in the air, lighted on his
+four feet, pranced, gamboled, curveted.
+
+"It is very hard to know one's duty or to do it, Hermes," said
+Daphne, patting his woolly brow.  Hermes intimated, by means of
+frisking legs and tail, that he would not try.
+
+"I believe you are bewitched," said the girl, suddenly taking him
+up in her arms.  "I believe you are some little changeling god
+sent by your master Apollo to put his thoughts into my head."
+
+He squirmed, and she put him down.  Then she gave him a harmless
+slap on his fleecy side.
+
+"But you aren't a good interpreter, Hermes.  Some way I think
+that his joyousness lies the other side of pain.  He never ran
+away from hard things."
+
+This was more than the lambkin could understand or bear, and he
+fled, hiding from her in the tall fern of a thicket in a corner
+of the field.
+
+The days were drifting by too fast.  Already the Contessa
+Accolanti had been away three weeks, and her letters held out no
+hope of an immediate return.  Giacomo and Assunta were very sorry
+for their young mistress, not knowing how little she was sorry
+for herself, and they tried to entertain her.  They had none of
+the hard exclusiveness of English servants, but admitted her
+generously to such of their family joys as she would share.
+Giacomo introduced her to the stables and the horses; Assunta
+initiated her into some of the mysteries of Italian cooking.
+Tommaso, the scullion, and Pia, the maid, stood by in grinning
+delight one day when the Contessa's sister learned to make
+macaroni.
+
+"Now I know," said Daphne, after she had stood for half an hour
+under the smoke-browned walls of the kitchen watching Assunta's
+manipulation of eggs and flour, the long kneading, the rolling
+out of a thin layer of dough, with the final cutting into thin
+strips; "to make Sunday and festal-day macaroni you take all the
+eggs there are, and mix them up with flour, and do all that to
+it; and then you boil it on the stove, and make a sauce for it
+out of everything there is in the house, bits of tomato, and
+parsley, and onion, and all kinds of meat.  E vero?."
+
+"Si," said Assunta, marveling at the patois that the Signorina
+spoke, and wondering if it contained Indian words.
+
+The very sight of the rows of utensils on the kitchen walls
+deepened the rebellious mood of this descendant of the Puritans.
+
+"Even the pots and pans have lovely shapes," said Daphne
+wistfully, for the slender necks, the winning curves, the lines
+of shallow bowl and basin bore testimony to the fact that the
+meanest thought of this people was a thought of beauty.  "I
+wonder why the Lord gave to them the curve, to us the angle?"
+
+When the macaroni was finished, Assunta invited the Signorina to
+go with her to a little house set by itself on the sloping hill
+back of the kitchen.
+
+"E carin', eh?" demanded Assunta, as she opened the
+door.
+
+Fragrance met them at the threshold, fragrance of fruit and of
+honey.  The warm sun poured in through the dirty, cobwebbed
+window when Assunta lifted the shade.  Ranged on shelves along
+the wall stood bottles of yellow oil; partly buried in the ground
+were numerous jars of wine, bottles and jars both keeping the
+beautiful Etruscan curves.  On shallow racks were spread bunches
+of yellow and of purple grapes, and golden combs of honey gleamed
+from dusky corners.
+
+"Ecco!" said Assunta, pointing to the wine jar from which she had
+been filling the bottle in her hand.  "The holy cross!  Does the
+Signorina see it?"
+
+"Si," said Daphne.
+
+"And here also?" asked Assunta, pointing to another.
+
+The girl nodded doubtfully.  Two irregular scratches could, by
+imaginative vision, be translated into a cross.
+
+"As on every one, Signorina," said Assunta triumphantly.  "And
+nobody puts it there.  It comes by itself."
+
+"Really?" asked the girl.
+
+"Veramente," replied the peasant woman.  "It has to, and not only
+here, but everywhere.  You see, years and years ago, there were
+heathen spirits in the wine, and they made trouble when our Lord
+came.  I have heard that the jars burst and the wine was wasted
+because the god of the wine was angry that the real God was born.
+And it lasted till San Pietro came and exorcised the wicked
+spirit, and he put a cross on a wine jar to keep him away.  Since
+then every wine jar bears somewhere the sign of the cross."
+
+"What became of the poor god?" asked Daphne.
+
+"He fled, I suppose to hell," answered Assunta piously.
+
+"Poor heathen gods!" murmured Daphne.
+
+The sunshine, flooding the little room, fell full on her face,
+and made red lights in her brown hair.
+
+"There was a god of the sun, too, named Apollo," she said,
+warming her hands in level rays.  " Was he banished too?"
+
+Assunta shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Who knows?  They dare not show their faces here since the Holy
+Father has blessed the land."
+
+Hermes bleated at the door, and the trio descended the hill
+together, Assunta carrying a basket of grapes and a bottle of
+yellow oil, Daphne with a slender flask of red wine in her hand.
+
+The next day the heavens opened, and rain poured down.  The
+cascades above the villa became spouting waterfalls; the narrow
+path beside them a leaping brook.  The rain had not the steady
+and persistent motion of well-conducted rain; it came in sheets,
+blown by sudden gusts against the windows, or driven in wild
+spurts among the cypresses.  The world from the villa windows
+seemed one blur of watery green, with a thin gray veil of mist to
+hide it.
+
+Daphne paced the mosaic floors in idleness, or spelled out the
+meaning of Petrarchan sonnets in an old vellum copy she had found
+in the library.  Sometimes she sat brooding in one of the faded
+gilt and crimson chairs in the salon, by the diminutive fireplace
+where two or three tiny twigs burned out their lives in an
+Italian thought of heat.
+
+What did a Greek god do when sunshine disappeared? she wondered.
+Or had the god of the sun gone away altogether, and was this
+deluge the result?  The shepherd Antoli had been taken home,
+Giacomo assured her, but he was exceedingly reticent when asked
+who was herding the sheep, only shrugging his shoulders with a
+"Chi Io sa?"
+
+On the second day of the rain Daphne saw that the flock had come
+near the house.  From the dining-room window she could see the
+sheep, with water soaking into their thick wool.  Some one was
+guarding them.  With little streams dashing from the drooping
+felt hat to the sheepskin clad shoulders, the keeper stood,
+motionless in the pelting rain.  The sheep ate greedily the wet,
+juicy grass, while the shepherd leaned on his staff and watched.
+Undoubtedly it was Antoli's peasant successor, Daphne thought, as
+she stood with her face to the dripping window pane.  Then the
+shepherd turned, and she recognized, under the wet hat brim, the
+glowing color and undaunted smile of her masquerading god.
+Whether he saw her or not she could not tell, but she stood by
+the storm-washed window in her scarlet house gown and watched,
+longing to give him shelter.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+He came to her next through music, when the rain clouds had
+broken away.  That divine whistle, mellow, mocking, irresistible,
+still was heard when morning lay on the hills.  Often, when
+afternoon had touched all the air to gold, when the shadows of
+chestnut and cypress and gnarled olive lay long on the grass,
+other sounds floated down to Daphne, music from some instrument
+that she did not know.  It was no harp, surely, yet certain
+clear, ranging notes seemed to come from the sweeping of harp
+strings; again, it had all the subtle, penetrating melody of the
+violin.  Whatever instrument gave it forth, it drew the girl's
+heart after it to wander its own way.  When it was gay it won her
+feet to some dance measure, and all alone in the great empty
+rooms she would move to it with head thrown back and her whole
+body swaying in a new sense of rhythm.  When it was sad, it set
+her heart to beating in great throbs, for then it begged and
+pleaded.  There was need in it, a human cry that surely was not
+the voice of a god. It spoke out of a great yearning that
+answered to her own.  Whether it was swift or slow she loved it,
+and waited for it day by day, thinking of Apollo and his harping
+to the muses nine.
+
+So her old life and her old mood slipped away like a garment no
+longer needed:  her days were set to melody, and her nights to
+pleasant dreams.  The jangle of street cars and the twinges of
+conscience, the noises of her native city, and her heart
+searchings in the Little Church of All the Saints faded to the
+remoteness of a faint gray bar of cloud that makes the sunset
+brighter in the west.  She went singing among the olives or past
+the fountain under the ilexes on the hill:  duties and
+perplexities vanished in the clear sunshine and pleasant shadow
+of this golden world.
+
+And all this meant that she had forgotten about the mails.  She
+had ceased to long for letters containing good news, or to fear
+that one full of bad tidings would come, and every one knows that
+such a state of mind as this is serious.  Now, when Assunta found
+her one morning, pacing the long, frescoed hall, by the side of
+the running water, and put a whole sheaf of letters into her
+hand, Daphne looked at them cautiously, and started to open one,
+then lost her courage and held them for a while to get used to
+them. Finally she went upstairs and changed her dress, putting on
+her short skirt and red felt hat, and walked out into the highway
+with Hermes skipping after her.  She walked rapidly up the even
+way, under the high stone walls green with overhanging ivy and
+wistaria vines, and the lamb kept pace with her with his gay
+gallop, broken now and then by a sidelong leap of sheer joy up
+into the air. Presently she found a turning that she had not
+known before, marked by a little wayside shrine, and taking it,
+followed a narrow grass-grown road that curled about the side of
+a hill.
+
+She read her father's letter first, walking slowly and smiling.
+If he were only here to share this wide beauty!  Then she read
+her sister's, which was full of woeful exclamations and bad news.
+The sick man was slowly dying, and they could not leave him.
+Meanwhile she was desolated by thinking of her little sister.  Of
+course she was safe, for Giacomo and Assunta were more
+trustworthy than the Italian government, but it must be very
+stupid, and she had meant to give Daphne such a gay time at the
+villa.  She would write at once to some English friends at Lake
+Scala, ten miles away, to see if they could not do something to
+relieve her sister's solitude.
+
+"To relieve my solitude!" gasped Daphne.  "Oh I am so afraid
+something will!"
+
+There were several other letters, all from friends at home.  One,
+in a great square envelope, addressed with an English scrawl, she
+dreaded, and she kept it for the last.  When she did tear it open
+her face grew quite pale.  There was much in it about duty and
+consecration, and much concerning two lives sacrificed to the
+same great ideal.  It breathed thoughts of denial and of
+annihilation of self, and,--yes, Eustace took her at her word and
+was ready to welcome again the old relation.  If she would permit
+him, he would send back the ring.
+
+Hermes hid behind a stone and dashed out at his mistress to
+surprise her, expecting to be chased as usual, but Daphne could
+not run. With heavy feet and downcast eyes she walked along the
+green roadway, then, when her knees suddenly became weak, sat
+down on a stone and covered her face with her hands.  She had not
+known until this moment how she had been hoping that two and two
+would not make four; she had not really believed that this could
+be the result of her letter of atonement.  Her soul had traveled
+far since she wrote that letter, and it was hard to find the way
+back. Hiding the brown and purple distances of the Campagna came
+pictures of dim, candle-lighted spaces, of a thin face with a
+setting of black and white priestly garments, and in her ears was
+the sound of a voice endlessly intoning.  It made up a vision of
+the impossible.
+
+She sat there a long, long time, and when she wakened to a
+consciousness of where she was, it was a whining voice that
+roused her.
+
+"Signorina, for the love of heaven, give me a few soldi, for I am
+starving."
+
+Daphne looked up and was startled, and yet old beggar women were
+common enough sights here among the hills.  This one had an evil
+look, with her cunning, half-shut eyes.
+
+The girl shook her head.
+
+"I have no money with me," she remarked.
+
+"But Signorina, so young, so beautiful, surely she has money with
+her."  A dirty brown hand came all too close to Daphne's face,
+and she sprang to her feet.
+
+"I have spoken," she said severely, giving a little stamp. "I
+have none.  Now go away."
+
+The whining continued, unintermittent.  The old woman came
+closer, and her hand touched the girl's skirt.  Wrenching herself
+away, Daphne found herself in the grasp of two skinny arms, and
+an actual physical struggle began.  The girl had no time for
+fear, and suddenly help came.  A firm hand caught the woman's
+shoulder, and the victim was free.
+
+"Are you hurt?" asked Apollo anxiously.
+
+She shook her head, smiling.
+
+"Frightened?"
+
+"No.  Don't you always rescue me?"
+
+"But this is merest accident, my being here.  It really isn't
+safe for you alone on these roads."
+
+"I knew you were near."
+
+"And yet, I have just this minute come round the hill.  You could
+not possibly have seen me."
+
+"I have ways of knowing," said Daphne, smiling demurely.
+
+A faint little bleat interrupted them.
+
+"Oh, oh!" cried the girl, "she is running away with Hermes!"
+
+Never did Apollo move more swiftly than he did then!  Daphne
+followed, with flying feet.  He reached the beggar woman, held
+her, took the lamb with one hand from her and handed it to
+Daphne. There followed a scene which the girl remembered
+afterward with a curious sense of misgiving and of question.  The
+thief gave one glance at the beautiful, angry face of the man,
+then fell at his feet, groveling and beseeching.  What she was
+saying the girl did not know, but her face and figure bore a look
+of more than mortal fear.
+
+"What does she think him?" murmured the girl.  Then she turned
+away with him, and, with the lamb at their heels, they walked
+together back along the grassy road.
+
+"You look very serious," remarked her protector.  "You are sure
+it is not fright?"
+
+She shook her head, holding up her bundle of letters.
+
+"Bad news?"
+
+"No, good," she answered, smiling bravely.
+
+"I hope good news will be infrequent," he answered.  "You look
+like Iphigenia going to be sacrificed."
+
+"I will admit that there is a problem," said the girl.  "There's
+a question about my doing something."
+
+"And you know it must be right to do it because you hate it?" he
+asked.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Don't you think so, too? Now when you answer," she added
+triumphantly, "I shall know what kind of god you are."
+
+They had reached the turning of the ways, and he stopped, as if
+intending to leave her.  "I cannot help you," he said sadly, "for
+I do not know the case.  Only, I think it is best not to decide
+by any abstruse rule.  Life is life's best teacher, and out of
+one's last experience comes insight for the next.  But don't be
+too sure that duty and unhappiness are one."
+
+She left him, standing by the little wayside shrine with a
+strange look on his face.  A tortured Christ hung there, casting
+the shadow of pain upon the passers-by.  The expression in the
+brown eyes of the heathen god haunted her all the way down the
+hill, and throughout the day:  they seemed to understand, and yet
+be glad.
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+It was nine o'clock as the Signorina descended the stairs.
+Through the open doorway morning met her, crisp and cool, with
+sunshine touching grass and green branch, still wet with dew.
+The very footfalls of the girl on the shallow marble steps were
+eager and expectant, and her face was gayer than those of the
+nymphs in the frescoes on the wall.  At the bottom of the stairs,
+Giacomo met her, his face wreathed in smiles.
+
+"Bertuccio has returned," he announced.
+
+"Si, si, Signorina," came the voice of Assunta, who was pushing
+her way through the dining-room door behind Giacomo.  She had on
+her magenta Sunday shawl, and the color of her wrinkled cheeks
+almost matched it.
+
+"What is Bertuccio?" asked the girl.  "A kitten?"
+
+"A kitten!" gasped Assunta.
+
+"Corpo di Bacco!" swore Giacomo.
+
+Then the two brown ones devoted mind and body to explanation.
+Giacomo gesticulated and waved the napkin he had in his hand;
+Assunta shook her black silk apron:  and they both spoke at once.
+
+"Il mio Bertuccio!  It is my little son, Signorina, and my only,
+and the Signorina has never seen his like.  When he was three
+years old he wore clothing for five years, and now he is six
+inches taller than his father."
+
+This and much more said Assunta, and she said it as one word.
+Giacomo, keeping pace and giving syllable for syllable,
+remarked:--
+
+"It is our Bertuccio who has been working in a tunnel in the
+Italian Alps, and has come home for rest.  He is engineer,
+Signorina, and has genius.  And before he became this he was
+guide here in the mountains, and he knows every path, every
+stone, every tree."
+
+"What?" asked Daphne feebly.
+
+Then, in a multitude of words that darkened knowledge, they said
+it all over again.  Bertuccio, the light of their eyes, the sole
+hope of their old age, had come home.  He could be the
+Signorina's guide among the hills, being very strong, very
+trusty, molto forte, molto fedele.
+
+"Oh, I know!" cried the Signorina, with a sudden light in her
+face. "Bertuccio is your son!"
+
+"Si, si, si, Signorina!" exclaimed Giacomo and Assunta together,
+ushering her into the dining-room.
+
+"It is the blessed saints who have managed it," added Assunta
+devoutly.  "A wreath of flowers from Rome, all gauze and
+spangles, will I lay at the shrine of our Lady, and there shall
+be a long red ribbon to say my thanks in letters of gold."
+
+The hope of the house was presented to the Signorina after
+breakfast. He was a broad-shouldered, round-headed offshoot of
+Italian soil, with honest brown eyes like those of both father
+and mother.  It was a face to be trusted, Daphne knew, and when,
+recovering from the embarrassment caused by his parents' pride in
+him, he blurted out the fact that he had already been to the
+village that morning to find a little donkey for the Signorina's
+wider journeyings, the girl welcomed the plan with delight.
+Grinning with pride Bertuccio disappeared among the stables, and
+presently returned, leading an asinetto.  It was a little,
+dun-colored thing, wearing a red-tasseled bridle and a small
+sheepskin saddle with red girth, but all the gay trappings could
+not soften the old primeval sadness of the donkey's face, under
+his long, questioning ears.  So Daphne won palfrey and
+cavalier.
+
+In the succeeding days the two jogged for hours together over the
+mountain roads.  Now they followed some grassy path climbing
+gently upward to the site of a buried town, where only mound and
+gray fragment of stone marked garden and forum.  Here was a bit
+of wall, with a touch of gay painting mouldering on an inner
+surface,--Venus, in robe of red, rising from a daintily suggested
+sea in lines of green.  They gathered fragments of old mosaic
+floor in their hands, blue lapis lazuli, yellow bits of giallo
+antico, red porphyry, trodden by gay feet and sad, unnumbered
+years ago.  They found broken pieces of iridescent glass that had
+fallen, perhaps, from shattered wine cups of the emperors, and
+all these treasures Bertuccio stored away in his wide pockets.
+Again, they climbed gracious heights and looked down over slopes
+and valleys, where deep grass grew over rich, crumbling earth,
+deposit of dead volcanoes, or saw, circled by soft green hills,
+some mountain lake, reflecting the perfect blue of Italian sky.
+
+Bertuccio usually walked behind; Daphne rode on ahead, with the
+sun burning her cheeks, and the air, fragrant with the odor of
+late ripening grapes on the upper hillsides, bringing
+intoxication. She seemed to herself so much a thing of falling
+rain, rich earth, and wakening sunshines that she would not have
+been surprised to find the purple bloom of those same grapes
+gathering on her cheeks, or her soft wisps of hair curling into
+tendrils, or spreading into green vine leaves.  They usually came
+home in the splendor of sunset, tired, happy, the red of Daphne's
+felt hat, the gorgeousness of Bertuccio's blue trousers and
+yellow waistcoat lighting the gloom of the cool, green-shaded
+ways.  Hermes always ran frisking to meet them, outstripping by
+his swiftness the slow plodding of the little ass.  Perhaps the
+lambkin felt the shadow of a certain neglect through these long
+absences, but at least he was generous and loved his rival.
+Quitting the kitchen and dining-room, he chose for his portion
+the pasture where the donkey grazed, in silence and in sadness,
+and frisked dangerously near his comrade's heels.  For all his
+melancholy, the asinetto was not insensible to caresses, and at
+night, when the lamb cuddled close to him as the two lay in the
+grass in the darkness, would curl his nose round now and then
+protectingly to see how this small thing fared.
+
+So Daphne kept forgetting, forgetting, and nothing recalled her
+to her perplexity, except her donkey.  San Pietro Martire she
+named him, for on his face was written the patience and the
+suffering of the saints.  Some un-ltalian sense of duty stiffened
+his hard little legs, gave rigid strength to his back.  Willing
+to trudge on with his load, willing to rest, carrying his head a
+little bent, blinking mournfully at the world from under the drab
+hair on his forehead, San Pietro stood as a type of the
+disciplined and chastened soul.  His very way of cropping the
+grass had something ascetic in it, reminding his mistress of
+Eustace at a festive dinner.
+
+"San Pietro, San Pietro," said Daphne one day, when Bertuccio was
+plodding far in the rear, whistling as he followed, "San Pietro,
+must I do it?"
+
+There was a drooping forward of the ears, a slight bending of the
+head, as the little beast put forth more strength to meet the
+difficulty of rising ground.
+
+"San Pietro, do you know what you are advising?  Do you at all
+realize what it is to be a clergyman's wife?"
+
+The steady straining of the donkey's muscles seemed to say that,
+to whatever station in life it pleased Providence to call him, he
+would think only of duty.
+
+Then Daphne alighted and sat on a stone, with the donkey's face
+to hers, taking counsel of those long ears which were always
+eloquent, whether pricked forward in expectation or laid back in
+wrath.
+
+"San Pietro, if I should give it up, and stay here and live,--for
+I never knew before what living is,--if I should just try to keep
+this sunshine and these great spaces of color, what would you
+think of me?"
+
+Eyes, ears, and the tragic corners of the mouth revealed the
+thought of this descendant of the burden bearers for all the
+earth's thousands of years.
+
+"Little beast, little beast," said Daphne, burying her face in
+the brownish fuzz of his neck, and drying her eyes there, "you
+are the one thing in this land of beauty that links me with home.
+You are the Pilgrim Fathers and the Catechism in one!  You are
+the Puritan Conscience made visible!  I will do it; I promise."
+
+San Pietro Martire looked round with mild inquiry on his face as
+to the meaning and the purpose of caresses in a hard world like
+this.
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+Bertuccio sprawled on his stomach on the grassy floor of the
+presence chamber in a palace of the Caesars', kicking with one
+idle foot a bit of stone that had once formed the classic nose of
+a god.  San Pietro Martire was quietly grazing in the long spaces
+of the Philosophers' Hall, nibbling deftly green blades of grass
+that grew at the bases of the broken pillars.  Near by lay the
+old amphitheatre, with its roof of blue sky, and its rows of
+grassy seats, circling a level stage and pit, and rising, one
+above another, in irregular outlines of green.  Here, in the spot
+on which the central royal seat had once been erected, sat Daphne
+on her Scotch plaid steamer blanket:  her head was leaning back
+against the turf, her lips were slightly parted, her eyes half
+closed.  She thought that she was meditating on the life that had
+gone on in this Imperial villa two thousand years ago:  its
+banquets, its philosophers' disputes, its tragedies and comedies
+played here with tears and laughter.  In reality she was half
+asleep.
+
+They were only a half mile from home, measuring by a straight
+line through the intervening hill; in time they were two hours
+away. San Pietro had climbed gallantly, with little silvery bells
+tinkling at his ears, to the summit of the mountain, and had
+descended, with conviction and with accuracy, planting firm
+little hard hoofs in the slippery path where the dark soil bore a
+coating of green grass and moss.  For all their hard morning's
+work they were still on the confines of the Villa Gianelli, whose
+kingdom was partly a kingdom of air and of mountain.
+
+Drowsing there in the old theatre in the sun, Daphne presently
+saw, stepping daintily through one of the entrances at the side,
+an audience of white sheep.  They overspread the stage, cropping
+as they went.  They climbed the green encircling seats, leaping
+up or down, where a softer tuft of grass invited.  They broke the
+dreamy silence with the muffled sound of their hoofs, and an
+occasional bleat.
+
+The girl knew them now.  She had seen before the brown-faced
+twins, both wearing tiny horns; they always kept together.  She
+knew the great white ewe with a blue ribbon on her neck, and the
+huge ram with twisted horns that made her half afraid.  Would he
+mind Scotch plaid, she wondered, as he raised his head and eyed
+her? She sat alert, ready for swift flight up the slope behind
+her in case of attack, but he turned to his pasture in the pit
+with the air of one ready to waive trifles, and the girl leaned
+back again.
+
+When Apollo, the keeper of sheep, entered, Daphne received his
+greeting with no surprise:  even if he had come without these
+forerunners she would have known that he was near.  It was she
+who broke the silence as he approached.
+
+"A theatre seems a singularly appropriate place for you and your
+flock," she remarked.  "You make a capital actor."
+
+There was no laughter in his eyes to-day and he did not answer. A
+wistful look veiled the triumphant gladness of his face.
+
+"They didn't play pastorals in olden time, did they?" asked
+Daphne.
+
+"No," he answered, "they lived them.  When they had forgotten how
+to do that they began to act."
+
+He took a flute from his pocket and began to play.  A cry rang
+out through the gladness of the notes, and it brought tears to
+the girl's eyes.  He stopped, seeing them there, and put the
+flute back into his pocket.
+
+"Did you take my advice the other day?" he asked.
+
+"The advice was very general," said Daphne.  "I presume an
+oracle's always is.  No, I did not follow it."
+
+"Antigone, Antigone," he murmured.
+
+"Why Antigone?" demanded the girl.
+
+"Because your duty is dearer to you than life, and love."
+
+"Please go down there," said the girl impetuously, "and play
+Antigone for me.  Make me see it and feel it.  I have been
+sitting here for an hour wishing that I could realize here a
+tragedy of long ago."
+
+He bowed submissively.
+
+"Commands from Caesar's seat must always be obeyed," he observed.
+"Do you know Greek, Antigone?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I know part of this play by heart," she faltered.  "My father
+taught me Greek words when I was small enough to ride his
+foot."
+
+He stepped down among the sheep to the grassy stage, laying aside
+his hat and letting the sun sparkle on his bright hair.  The odd
+sheepskin coat lent a touch of grotesqueness to his beauty as he
+began.
+
+"'Nay, be thou what thou wilt; but I will bury him:  well for me
+to die in doing that.  I shall rest, a loved one with him whom I
+have loved, sinless in my crime; for I owe a longer allegiance to
+the dead than to the living:  in that world I shall abide
+forever.'"
+
+Slow, full, and sweet the words came, beating like music on the
+girl's heart.  All the sorrow of earth seemed gathered up in the
+undertones, all its hunger and thirst for life and love:  in it
+rang the voice of a will stronger than death and strong as love.
+
+The sheep lifted their heads and looked on anxiously, as if for a
+moment even the heart of a beast were touched by human sorrow.
+From over the highest ridge of this green amphitheatre San Pietro
+looked down with the air of one who had nothing more to learn of
+woe.  Apollo stood in the centre of the stage, taking one voice,
+then another:  now the angry tone of the tyrant, Creon, now the
+wail of the chorus, hurt but undecided, then breaking into the
+unspeakable sweetness and firmness of Antigone's tones.  The
+sheep went back to their nibbling; San Pietro trotted away with
+his jingling bells, but Daphne sat with her face leaning on her
+hands, and slow tears trickling over her fingers.
+
+The despairing lover's cry broke in on Antigone's sorrow; Haemon,
+"bitter for the baffled hope of his marriage," pleaded with his
+father Creon for the life of his beloved.  Into his arguments for
+mercy and justice crept that cry of the music on the hills that
+had sounded through lonely hours in Daphne's ears.  It was the
+old call of passion, pleading, imperious, irresistible, and the
+girl on Caesar's seat answered to it as harp strings answer to
+the master's hand.  The wail of Antigone seemed to come from the
+depths of her own being:--
+
+"Bear me witness, in what sort, unwept of friends, and by what
+laws I pass to the rock-closed prison of my strange tomb, ah me
+unhappy!...  No bridal bed, no bridal song hath been mine, no joy
+of marriage."
+
+The sun hung low above the encircling hills when the lover's last
+cry sounded in the green theatre, drowning grief in triumph as he
+chose death with his beloved before all other good.  Then there
+was silence, while the round, golden sun seemed resting in a
+red-gold haze on the hilltop, and Daphne, sitting with closed
+eyes, felt the touch of two hands upon her own.
+
+"Did you understand?" asked a voice that broke in its tenderness.
+
+She nodded, with eyes still closed, for she dared not trust them
+open.  He bent and kissed her hands, where the tears had fallen
+on them, then, turning, called his sheep.  Three minutes later
+there was no trace of him or of them:  they had vanished as if by
+magic, leaving silence and shadow.  The girl climbed the hill
+toward home on San Pietro's back, shaken, awed, afraid.
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+If Bertuccio had but shown any signs of having seen her companion
+of yesterday, Daphne's bewilderment would have been less; but to
+keep meeting a being who claimed to belong to another world, who
+came and went, invisible, it would seem, when he chose, to other
+eyes except her own, might well rouse strange thoughts in the
+mind of a girl cut off from her old life in the world of
+commonplace events.  To be sure, the shepherd Antoli had seen
+him, but had spoken of him voluntarily as a mysterious creature,
+one of the blessed saints come down to aid the sick.  The beggar
+woman had seen him, but had fallen prostrate at his feet as in
+awe of supernatural presence.  When the wandering god had talked
+across the hedge the eyes of Giacomo and Assunta had apparently
+been holden; and now Bertuccio, whose ears were keen, and whose
+eyes, in their lazy Italian fashion, saw more then they ever
+seemed to, Bertuccio had been all the afternoon within a stone's
+throw of the place where the god had played to her, and Bertuccio
+gave no sign of having seen a man.  She eyed him questioningly as
+they started out the next morning on their way to the ruins of
+some famous baths on the mountain facing them.
+
+There was keenness in the autumn air that morning, but the green
+slopes far and near bore no trace of flaming color or of decay,
+as in fall at home; it was rather like a glimpse of some cool,
+eternal spring.  A stream of water trickled down under thick
+grass at the side of the road, and violets grew there.
+
+"San Pietro!" said Daphne, with a little tug at the bridle.  The
+long ears were jerked hastily back to hear what was to come. "I
+know you disapprove of me, for you saw it all."
+
+The ears kept that position in which any one who has ever loved a
+donkey recognizes scathing criticism.  Daphne fingered one of
+them with her free hand.
+
+"It is only on your back that I feel any strength of mind," she
+added.  "When I am by myself something seems sweeping me away, as
+the tides sweep driftwood out to sea; but here, resolution crawls
+up through my body.  We must be a new kind of centaur, San
+Pietro."
+
+Suddenly her face went down between his ears.
+
+"But if you and I united do drive him away, what shall we
+do,--afterwards?"
+
+"Signorina!" called Bertuccio, running up behind them.  "Look!
+The olives pick themselves."
+
+At a turn in the road the view had opened.  There, in a great
+orchard on the side of the hill, the peasants were gathering
+olives before the coming of the frost.  There were scores of
+pickers wearing great gay-colored aprons in which they placed the
+olives as they gathered them from the trees.  Ladders leaned
+against knotty tree trunks; baskets filled with the green fruit
+stood on the ground.  Ladder and basket suggested the apple
+orchards of her native land, but the motley colors of kerchief
+and apron, yellow, magenta, turquoise, and green, and the gray of
+the eternal olive trees with the deep blue of the sky behind
+them, recalled her to the enchanted country where she was fast
+losing the landmarks of home.
+
+"Signorina Daphne," said Bertuccio, speaking slowly as to a
+child, "did you ever hear them tell of the maiden on the hills up
+here who was carried away by a god?"
+
+Daphne turned swiftly and tried to read his face.  It was no less
+expressionless than usual.
+
+"No," she answered.  "Tell me.  I am fond of stories."
+
+They were climbing the winding road again, leaving the olive
+pickers behind.  Bertuccio walked near, holding the donkey's tail
+to steady his steps.
+
+"It was long ago, ages and ages.  Her father had the care of an
+olive orchard that was old, older than our Lord," said Bertuccio,
+devoutly crossing himself.  "There was one tree in it that was
+enormously big, as large as this,--see the measure of my arms! It
+was open and hollow, but growing as olives will when there is
+every reason why they should be dead.  One night the family were
+eating their polenta--has the Signorina tasted our polenta ?  It
+makes itself from chestnuts, and it is very good.  I must speak
+to my mother to offer some to the Signorina.  Well, the door
+opened without any knocking, and a stranger stood there:  he was
+young, and beyond humanity, beautiful."
+
+Bertuccio paused; the girl felt slow red climbing to her cheek.
+She dared not look behind, yet she would have given half her
+possessions to see the expression of his face.  Leaning forward,
+she played with the red tassels at San Pietro's ears.
+
+"Go on! go on!" she commanded.  "Avanti!"
+
+San Pietro thought that the words were meant for him, and indeed
+they were more appropriate here for donkey than for man.
+
+"He sat with them and shared their polenta," continued Bertuccio,
+walking more rapidly to keep up with San Pietro's quickened step.
+"And he made them all afraid.  It was not that he had any
+terrible look, or that he did anything strange, only, each
+glance, each motion told that he was more than merely man.  And
+he looked at the maiden with eyes of love, and she at him," said
+Bertuccio, lacking art to keep his hearer in suspense.  "She too
+was beautiful, as beautiful, perhaps, as the Signorina,"
+continued the story-teller.
+
+Daphne looked at him sharply:  did he mean any further
+comparison? There were hot waves now on neck and face, and her
+heart was beating furiously.
+
+"He came often, and he always met the maiden by the hollow tree:
+it was large enough for them to stand inside.  And her father and
+mother were troubled, for they knew he was a god, not one of our
+faith, Signorina, but one of the older gods who lived here before
+the coming of our Lord.  One day as he stood there by the tree
+and was kissing the maiden on her mouth, her father came, very
+angry, and scolded her, and defied the god, telling him to go
+away and never show his face there again.  And then, he never
+knew how it happened, for the stranger did not touch him, but he
+fell stunned to the ground, with a queer flash of light in his
+eyes.  When he woke, the stars were shining over him, and he
+crawled home.  But the maiden was gone, and they never saw her
+any more, Signorina. Whether it was for good or for ill, she had
+been carried away by the god.  People think that they disappeared
+inside the tree, for it closed up that night, and it never opened
+again.  Sometimes they thought they heard voices coming from it,
+and once or twice, cries and sobs of a woman.  Maybe she is
+imprisoned there and cannot get out:  it would be a terrible
+fate, would it not, Signorina? Me, I think it is better to fight
+shy of the heathen gods."
+
+Bertuccio's white teeth showed in a broad smile, but no scrutiny
+on Daphne's part could tell her whether he had told his story for
+pleasure merely, or for warning.  She rode on in silence,
+realizing, as she had not realized before, how far this peasant
+stock reached back into the elder days of the ancient world.
+
+"Do you think that your story is true, Bertuccio?" she asked, as
+they came in sight of the grass-grown mounds of the buried
+watering-place toward which their steps were bent.
+
+"Ma che!" answered Bertuccio, shrugging his shoulders, and
+snapping his fingers meaningly.  "So much is true that one does
+not see, and one cannot believe all that one does see."
+
+Daphne started.  What HAD he seen?
+
+"Besides," added Bertuccio, "there is proof of this.  My father's
+father saw the olive tree, and it was quite closed."
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+Over the shallow tufa basin of the great fountain on the hill
+Daphne stood gazing into the water.  She had sought the deep
+shadow of the ilex trees, for the afternoon was warm, an almost
+angry summer heat having followed yesterday's coolness.  Her
+yellow gown gleamed like light against the dull brown of the
+stone and the dark moss-touched trunks of the trees.  Whether she
+was looking at the tufts of fern and of grass that grew in the
+wet basin, or whether she was studying her own beauty reflected
+there, no one could tell, not even Apollo, who had been watching
+her for some time.
+
+Into his eyes as he looked leaped a light like the flame of the
+sunshine beyond the shadows on the hill; swiftly he stepped
+forward and kissed the girl's shoulder where the thin yellow
+stuff of her dress showed the outward curve to the arm.  She
+turned and faced him, without a word.  There was no need of
+speech:  anger battled with unconfessed joy in her changing face.
+
+"How dare you?" she said presently, when she had won her lips to
+curves of scorn.  "The manners of the gods seem strange to
+mortals."
+
+"I love you," he answered simply.
+
+Then there was no sound save that of the water, dropping over the
+edge of the great basin to the soft grass beneath.
+
+"Can't you forgive me?" he asked humbly.  "I am profoundly sorry;
+only, my temptation was superhuman."
+
+"I had thought that you were that, too," said the girl in a
+whisper.
+
+"There is no excuse, I know; there is only a reason.  I love you,
+little girl.  I love your questioning eyes, and your firm mouth,
+and your smooth brown hair"--
+
+"Stop!" begged Daphne, putting out her hands.  "You must not say
+such things to me, for I am not free to hear them.  I must go
+away," and she turned toward home.  But he grasped one of the
+outstretched hands and drew her to the stone bench near the
+fountain, and then seated himself near her side.
+
+"Now tell me what you mean," he said quietly.
+
+"I mean," she answered, with her eyes cast down, "that two years
+ago I promised to love some one else.  I must not even hear what
+you are trying to say to me."
+
+"I think, Miss Willis," he said gently, " that you should have
+told me this before."
+
+"How could I?" begged the girl.  "When could I have done it? Why
+should I?"
+
+"I do not know," he answered wearily; "only, perhaps it might
+have spared me some shade of human anguish."
+
+"Human?" asked Daphne, almost smiling.
+
+"No, no, no," he interrupted, not hearing her.  "It would not
+have done any good, for I have loved you from the first minute
+when l saw your blue drapery flutter in your flight from me.
+Some deeper sense than mortals have told me that every footstep
+was falling on my sleeping heart and waking it to life.  You were
+not running away; in some divine sense you were coming toward me.
+Daphne, Daphne, I cannot let you go!"
+
+The look in the girl's startled eyes was his only answer.  By the
+side of this sun-browned face, in its beauty and its power, rose
+before her a vision of Eustace Denton, pale, full-lipped, with an
+ardor for nothingness in his remote blue eyes.  How could she
+have known, in those old days before her revelation came, that
+faces like this were on the earth:  how could she have dreamed
+that glory of life like this was possible?
+
+In the great strain of the moment they both grew calm and Daphne
+told him her story, as much of it as she thought it wise for him
+to know.  Her later sense of misgiving, the breaking of the
+engagement, the penitence that had led to a renewal of the bonds,
+she concealed from him; but he learned of the days of study and
+of quiet work in the shaded corners of her father's library, and
+of those gayer days and evenings when the figure of the young
+ascetic had seemed to the girl to have a peculiar saving grace,
+standing in stern contrast to the social background of her life.
+
+He thanked her, when she had finished, and he watched her, with
+her background of misty blue distance, sitting where the shadow
+of the ilexes brought out the color of her scarlet lips and deep
+gray eyes.
+
+"Daphne," he said presently, "you have told me much about this
+man, but you have not told me that you love him.  You do not
+speak of him as a woman speaks of the man who makes her world for
+her. You defend him, you explain him, you plead his cause, and it
+must be that you are pleading it with yourself, for I have
+brought no charge, that you must defend him to me.  Do you love
+him?"
+
+She did not answer.
+
+"Look at me!" he insisted.  Her troubled eyes turned toward his,
+but dared not stay, and the lashes fell again.
+
+"Do not commit the crime of marrying a man you do not love," he
+pleaded.
+
+"But," said the girl slowly, "even if I gave him up I might not
+care for you."
+
+"Dear," he said softly, "you do love me.  Is it not so?"
+
+She shook her head, but her face belied her.
+
+"I have waited, waited for you," he pleaded, in that low tone to
+which her being vibrated as to masterful music, "so many
+lifetimes! I have found you out at last!"
+
+"How long?" she asked willfully.
+
+"Aeons," he answered.  "Since the foundation of the world.  I
+have waited, and now that I have found you, I will not let you
+go.  I will not let you go!"
+
+She looked at him with wide-opened eyes:  a solemn fear possessed
+her.  Was it Bertuccio's story of yesterday that filled her with
+foreboding?  Hardly.  Rather it seemed a pleasant thought that he
+and she should feel the bark of one of these great trees closing
+round them, and should have so beautiful a screen of brown bark
+and green moss to hide their love from all the world.  No, no
+fear could touch the thought of any destiny with him:  she was
+afraid only of herself.
+
+"You are putting a mere nothing between us," the voice went on.
+"You are pretending that there is an obstacle when there is none,
+really."
+
+"Only another man's happiness," murmured the girl.
+
+"I doubt if he knows what happiness is," said Apollo.  "Forgive
+me, but will he not be as happy with his altar candles and his
+chants without you?  Does he not care more for the abstract cause
+for which he is working than for you?  Hasn't he missed the
+simple meaning of human life, and can anything teach it to him?"
+
+"How did you know?" asked Daphne, startled.
+
+"The gods should divine some things that are not told!  Besides,
+I know the man," he answered, smiling, but Daphne did not hear.
+She had leaned back and closed her eyes.  The warm, sweet air,
+with its odor of earth, wooed her; the little breeze that made so
+faint a rustle in the ilex leaves touched her cheek like quick,
+fluttering kisses.  The rhythmical drops from the fountain seemed
+falling to the music of an old order of things, some simple,
+elemental way of loving that made harmony through all life.
+Could love, that had meant only duty, have anything to do with
+this great joy in mere being, which turned the world to gold?
+
+"I must, I must win you," came the voice again, and it was like a
+cry.  "Loving with more than human love, I will not be
+denied!"
+
+She opened her eyes and watched him:  the whole, firmly-knit
+frame in the brown golf-suit was quivering.
+
+"It has never turned out well," she said lightly, "when the sons
+of the gods married with the daughters of men."
+
+Perhaps he would have rebuked her for the jest, but he saw her
+face.
+
+"I offer you all that man or god can offer," he said, standing
+before her.  "I offer you the devotion of a whole life.  Will you
+take it?"
+
+"I will not break my promise," said the girl, rising.  Her eyes
+were level with his.  She found such power in them that she cried
+out against it in sudden anger.
+
+"Why do you tempt me so?  Why do you come and trouble my mind and
+take away my peace?  Who are you?  What are you?"
+
+"lf you want a human name for me"--he answered.
+
+She raised her hand swiftly to stop him.  "No, don't!" she said.
+"I do not want to know.  Don't tell me anything, for the mystery
+is part of the beauty of you."
+
+A shaft of golden sunlight pierced the ilex shade and smote her
+forehead as she stood there.
+
+"Apollo, the sun god," she said, smiling, as she turned and left
+him alone.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Overhead was a sky of soft, dusky blue, broken by the clear light
+of the stars:  all about were the familiar walks of the villa
+garden, mysterious now in the darkness, and seeming to lead into
+infinite space.  The lines of aloe, fig, and palm stood like
+shadows guarding a world of mystery.  Daphne, wandering alone in
+the garden at midnight, half exultant, half afraid, stepped
+noiselessly along the pebbled walks with a feeling that that
+world was about to open for her.  Ahead, through an arch where
+the thick foliage of the ilexes had been cut to leave the way
+clear for the passer-by, a single golden planet shone low in the
+west, and the garden path led to it.
+
+Daphne had been unable to sleep, for sleeplessness had become a
+habit during the past week.  Whether she was too happy or too
+unhappy she could not tell:  she only knew that she was restless
+and smothering for air and space.  Hastily dressing, she had
+stolen on tiptoe down the broad stairway by the running water and
+out into the night, carrying a tiny Greek lamp with a single
+flame, clear, as only the flame of olive oil can be.  She had put
+the lamp down in the doorway, and it was burning there now, a
+beacon to guide her footsteps when she wanted to return.
+Meanwhile, the air was cool on throat and forehead and on her
+open palms: she had no wish to go in.
+
+Here was a fountain whose jets of water, blown high from the
+mouths of merry dolphins, fell in spray in a great stone basin
+where mermaids waited for the shower to touch bare shoulders and
+bended heads.  The murmur of the water, mingled with the murmur
+of unseen live things, and the melody of night touched the girl's
+discordant thoughts to music.  Of what avail, after all, was her
+fierce struggle for duty?  Here were soft shadows, and great
+spaces, and friendly stars.
+
+Of course her lover-god, Apollo, was gone.  She had known the
+other day when she left him on the hill that she would not see
+him again, for the look of his face had told her that.  Of
+course, it was better so.  Now, everything would go on as had
+been intended. Anna would come home; after this visit was over,
+there would be New York again, and Eustace.  Yes, she was brave
+to share his duty with him, and the years would not be long.  And
+always these autumn days would be shining through the dark hours
+of her life, these perfect days of sunshine without shadow.  Of
+their experiences she need not even tell, for she was not sure
+that it had actually been real.  She would keep it as a sacred
+memory that was half a dream.
+
+She was walking now by the rows of tall chrysanthemums, and she
+reached out her fingers to touch them, for she could almost feel
+their deep yellow through her finger-tips.  It was like taking
+counsel of them, and they, like all nature, were wise.  Cypress
+and acacia and palm stood about like strong comforters; help came
+from the tangled vines upon the garden wall, from the matted
+periwinkle on the ground at her feet, and the sweet late roses
+blossoming in the dark.
+
+Yes, he was gone, and the beauty and the power of him had
+vanished. It was better so, she kept saying to herself, her
+thoughts, no matter where they wandered, coming persistently
+back, as if the idea, so obviously true, needed proving after
+all.  The only thing was, she would have liked to see him just
+once more to show him how invincible she was.  He had taken her
+by surprise that day upon the hill, and had seen what she had not
+meant to tell.  Now, if she could confront him once, absolutely
+unshaken, could tell him her decision, give him words of
+dismissal in a voice that had no tremor in it, as her voice had
+had the other day, that would be a satisfactory and triumphant
+parting for one who had come badly off.  Her shoulder burned yet
+where he had kissed it, and yet she was not angry.  He must have
+known that day how little she was vexed.  If she could only see
+him once again, she said wistfully to herself, to show him how
+angry she was, all would be well.
+
+Daphne had wandered to the great stone gate that led out upon the
+highway, and was leaning her forehead against a moss-grown post,
+when she heard a sudden noise.  Then the voice of San Pietro
+Martire broke the stillness of the night, and Daphne, listening,
+thought she heard a faint sound of bleating.  Hermes was calling
+her, and Hermes was in danger.  Up the long avenue she ran toward
+the house, and, seizing the tiny lamp at the doorway, sped up the
+slope toward the inclosure where the two animals grazed, the
+flame making a trail of light like that of a firefly moving
+swiftly in the darkness.  The bray rang out again, but there was
+no second sound of bleating.  Inside the pasture gate she found
+the donkey anxiously sniffing at something that lay in the grass.
+Down on her knees went Daphne, for there lay Hermes stretched out
+on his side, with traces of blood at his white throat.
+
+The girl put down her lamp and lifted him in her arms.  Some
+cowardly dog had done this thing, and had run away on seeing her,
+or hearing her unfasten the gate.  She put one finger on the
+woolly bosom, but the heart was not beating.  The lamb's awkward
+legs were stretched out quite stiffly, and his eyes were
+beginning to glaze.  Two tears dropped on the fat white side;
+then Daphne bent and kissed him.  Looking up, she saw San Pietro
+gazing on with the usual grief of his face intensified.  It was
+as if he understood that the place at his back where the lamb had
+cuddled every night must go cold henceforward.
+
+"We must bury him, San Pietro," said Daphne presently.  "Come
+help me find a place."
+
+She put the lambkin gently down upon the ground, and, rising,
+started, with one arm over San Pietro's neck, to find a burial
+place for the dead.  The donkey followed willingly, for he
+permitted himself to love his lady with a controlled but genuine
+affection; and together they searched by the light of the firefly
+lamp.  At last Daphne halted by a diminutive cypress, perhaps two
+feet high, and announced that she was content.
+
+The tool-house was not far away.  Investigating, she found, as
+she had hoped, that the door was not locked.  Arming herself with
+a hoe she came back, and, under the light of southern stars, dug
+a little grave in the soft, dark earth, easily loosened in its
+crumbling richness.  Then she took the lamp and searched in the
+deep thick grass for flowers, coming back with a mass of
+pink-tipped daisies gathered in her skirt.  The sight of the
+brown earth set her to thinking:  there ought to be some kind of
+shroud.  Near the tool-house grew a laurel tree, she remembered,
+and from that she stripped a handful of green, glossy leaves, to
+spread upon the bottom of the grave.  This done, she bore the
+body of Hermes to his resting-place, and strewed the corpse with
+pink daisies.
+
+"Should he have Christian or heathen burial?" she asked, smiling.
+"This seems to be a place where the two faiths meet.  I think
+neither.  He must just be given back to Mother Nature."
+
+She heaped the sod over him with her own hands, and fitted neatly
+together some bits of turf.  Then she took up her lamp to go. San
+Pietro, tired of ceremony, was grazing in the little circle of
+light.
+
+"To-morrow," said Daphne, as she went down the hill, "he will be
+eating grass from Hermes' grave."
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+The shadow of branching palms fell on the Signorina's hair and
+hands as she sat at work near the fountain in the garden weaving
+a great wreath of wild cyclamen and of fern gathered from the
+hillside.  Assunta was watching her anxiously, her hands resting
+on her hips.
+
+"It's a poor thing to offer the Madonna," she said at length,
+"just common things that grow."
+
+Daphne only smiled at her and went on winding white cord about
+the stems under green fronds where it could not be seen.
+
+"I was ready to buy a wreath of beautiful gauze flowers from
+Rome," ventured Assunta, "all colors, red and yellow and purple.
+I have plenty of silver for it upstairs in a silk bag.  Our Lady
+will think I am not thankful, though the blessed saints know I
+have never been so thankful in my life as I am for Bertuccio's
+coming home when he did."
+
+"The Madonna will know," said Daphne.  "She will like this better
+than anything else."
+
+"Are you sure?" asked Assunta dubiously.
+
+"Yes," asserted the girl, laughing.  "She told me so!"
+
+The audacity of the remark had an unexpected effect on the
+peasant woman.  Assunta crossed herself.
+
+"Perhaps she did!  Perhaps she did!  And do you think she does
+not mind my waiting?"
+
+"No," answered Daphne gravely.  "She knows that you have been
+very busy taking care of me."
+
+Assunta trotted away, apparently content, to consult Giacomo
+about dinner.  The girl went on weaving with busy fingers, the
+shadow of her lashes on her cheek.  As she worked her thoughts
+wove for her the one picture that they made always for her now:
+Apollo standing on the hillside under the ilexes with the single
+ray of sunshine touching his face.  All the rest of her life kept
+fading, leaving the minutes of that afternoon alone distinct.
+And it was ten days ago!
+
+Presently Giacomo came hurrying down the path toward her,
+dangling his white apron by its string as he ran.
+
+"Signorina!" he called breathlessly.  "Would the Signorina, when
+she has finished that, graciously make another wreath?"
+
+"Certainly.  For you?"
+
+"Not for me," he answered mysteriously, drawing nearer.  "Not for
+me, but for Antoli, the shepherd who herds the flock of Count
+Gianelli.  He has seen from the window the Signorina making a
+wreath for our Lady, and he too wants to present her with a
+thank-offering for the miracle she wrought for him.  But will the
+Signorina permit him to come and tell her?"
+
+Even while Giacomo was speaking Daphne saw the man slowly
+approaching, urged on apparently by encouraging gestures from
+Assunta, who was standing at the corner of the house.  A thrill
+went through the girl's nerves as she saw the rough brown head of
+the peasant rising above the sheepskin coat that the shepherd-god
+had worn.  Unless miracle had made another like it, it was the
+very same, even to the peculiar jagged edge where it met in
+front.
+
+Antoli's expression was foolish and ashamed, but at Giacomo's
+bidding be began a recital of his recent experiences.  The girl
+strained her ears to listen, but hardly a word of this dialect of
+the Roman hills was intelligible to her.
+
+The gesture wherewith the shepherd crossed himself, and his
+devout pointing to the sky were all she really understood.
+
+Then Giacomo translated.
+
+"Because he was ill--but the Signorina knows the story--the
+blessed Saint Sebastian came down to him and guarded the sheep,
+and he went home and became well, miraculously well.  See how he
+is recovered from his fever!  It was our Lady who wrought it all.
+Now he comes back and all his flock is there:  not one is
+missing, but all are fat and flourishing.  Does not the Signorina
+believe that it was some one from another world who helped him?"
+
+"Si," answered Daphne, looking at the sheepskin coat.
+
+"No one has seen the holy saint except himself, but the blessed
+one has appeared again to him.  Antoli came back, afraid that the
+sheep were scattered, afraid of being dismissed.  He found his
+little tent in order; food was there, and better food than
+shepherds have, eggs and wine and bread.  While he waited the
+blessed one himself came, with light shining about his hair.  He
+brought back the coat that he had worn:  see, is it not proof
+that he was there?"
+
+"The coat was a new one," interrupted the shepherd.
+
+Giacomo repeated, and went on.
+
+"He smiled and talked most kindly, and when he went away--the
+Signorina understands?"
+
+Daphne nodded.
+
+"He gave his hand to Antoli," said Giacomo breathlessly.
+
+"I will make the wreath," said the Signorina, smiling.  "It shall
+be of these," and she held up a handful of pink daisies, mingled
+with bits of fern and ivy leaves.  "Assunta shall take it to the
+church when she takes hers.  I rejoice that you are well," she
+added, turning to Antoli with a polite sentence from the
+phrase-book.
+
+As she worked on after they were gone, Assunta came to her again.
+
+"The Signorina heard?" she asked.
+
+"Si.  Is the story true?" asked Daphne.
+
+Assunta's eyes were full of hidden meaning.
+
+"The Signorina ought to know."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Has not the Signorina seen the blessed one herself?" she asked.
+
+"I?" said Daphne, starting.
+
+"The night the lambkin was killed, did not the Signorina go out
+in great distress, and did not the blessed one come to her aid?"
+
+"Ma che!" exclaimed Daphne faintly, falling back, in her
+astonishment, upon Assunta's vocabulary.
+
+"I have told no one, not even Giacomo," said Assunta, "but I saw
+it all.  The noise had wakened me, and I followed, but I stopped
+when I saw that the divine one was there.  Only I watched from
+the clump of cypress trees."
+
+"Where was he?" asked Daphne with unsteady voice.
+
+"Beyond the laurel trees," said Assunta.  "Did not the Signorina
+see?"
+
+The girl shook her head.
+
+"How did you know that he was one of the divine?" she asked.
+
+"Can I not tell the difference between mortal man and one of
+them?" cried the peasant woman scornfully.  "It was the shining
+of his face, and the light about his hair, Signorina.  Every look
+and every motion showed that he was not of this world.  Besides,
+how could I see him in the dark if he were not the blessed Saint
+Sebastian?  And who sent the dog away if it was not he?" she
+added triumphantly.
+
+"But why should he appear to me?" asked Daphne.  "I have no claim
+upon the help of the saints."
+
+"Perhaps because the Signorina is a heretic," answered Assunta
+tenderly.  "Our Lady must have special care for her if she sends
+out the holy ones to bring her to the fold."
+
+The woman's face was alight with reverence and pride, and Daphne
+turned back to her flowers, shamed by these peasant folk for
+their belief in the immanence of the divine.
+
+Half an hour later Assunta reappeared, clad in Sunday garments,
+wearing her best coral earrings and her little black silk
+shoulder shawl covered with gay embroidered flowers.  She held
+out a letter to the girl.
+
+"I go to take the wreaths to Our Lady," she announced, "and to
+confess and pray.  The Signorina has made them pretty, if they
+are but common things."
+
+Daphne was reading her letter; even the peasant woman could see
+that it bore glad tidings, for the light that broke in the girl's
+face was like the coming of dawn over the hills.
+
+"Wait, Assunta," she said quietly, when she had finished, and she
+disappeared among the trees.  In a minute she came back with
+three crimson roses, single, and yellow at the heart.
+
+"Will you take them with your wreaths for me to the Madonna?" she
+said, putting them into Assunta's hand.  "I am more thankful than
+either one of you."
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Assunta had carried a small tray out to the arbor in the garden,
+and Daphne was having her afternoon tea there alone.  About her,
+on the frescoed walls of this little open-air pavilion, were
+grouped pink shepherds and shepherdesses, disporting themselves
+in airy garments of blue and green in a meadow that ended
+abruptly to make room for long windows.  The girl leaned back and
+sipped her tea luxuriously.  She was clad in a gown that any
+shepherdess among them might have envied, a pale yellow crepy
+thing shot through with gleams of gold.  Before her the Countess
+Accolanti's silver service was set out on an inlaid Florentine
+table, partially protected by an open work oriental scarf.  Upon
+it lay the letter that had come an hour before, and the Signorina
+now and then feasted her eyes upon it.  Just outside the door was
+a bust of Masaccio, set on a tall pedestal, grass growing on the
+rough hair and heavy eyelids.  Pavilion and tea-table seemed an
+odd bit of convention, set down in the neglected wildness of this
+old garden, and Daphne watched it all with entire satisfaction
+over her Sevres teacup.
+
+Presently she was startled by seeing Assunta come hurrying back
+with a teacup and saucer in one hand, a hot water jug in the
+other. The rapid Italian of excited moments Daphne never
+pretended to understand, consequently she gathered from Assunta's
+incoherent words neither names nor impressions, only the bare
+fact that a caller for the Countess Accolanti had rung the bell.
+
+"He inquired, too, for the Signorina," remarked the peasant woman
+finally, when her breath had nearly given out.
+
+"Do you know him?" asked Daphne.  "Have you seen him before?"
+
+"But yes, thousands of times," said Assunta in a stage whisper.
+"See, he comes.  I thought it best to say that he would find the
+Signorina in the garden.  And the Signorina must pardon me for
+the card:  I dropped it into the tea-kettle and it is wet, quite
+wet."
+
+Assunta had time to note with astonishment before she left that
+hostess and caller met as old friends, for the Signorina held out
+her hand in greeting before a word of introduction had been said.
+
+"I am told that your shepherd life is ended," remarked Daphne, as
+she filled the cup just brought.  Neither her surprise nor her
+joy in his coming showed in her face.
+
+"For the present, yes."
+
+"You have won great devotion," said Daphne, smiling.  "Only, they
+all mistake you for a Christian saint."
+
+"What does it matter?" said Apollo.  "The feeling is the
+same."
+
+"Assunta knew you at once as one of those in her calendar," the
+girl went on, "but she seems to recognize your supernatural
+qualities only by lamplight.  I am a little bit proud that I can
+detect them by day as well."
+
+Her gayety met no response from him, and there was a long pause.
+To the girl it seemed that the enveloping sunshine of the garden
+was only a visible symbol of her new divine content.  If she had
+looked closely, which she dared not do, she would have seen that
+the lurking sadness in the man's face had leaped to the surface,
+touching the brown eyes with a look of eternal grief.
+
+"I ventured to stop," he said presently, "because I was not sure
+that happy chance would throw us together again.  I have come to
+say good-by."
+
+"You are going away?"
+
+"I am going away," he answered slowly.
+
+"So shall I, some day," said Daphne, "and then moss will grow
+green on my seat by the fountain, and San Pietro will be sold to
+some peddler who will beat him.  Of course it had to end!
+Sometimes, when you tread the blue heights of Olympus, will you
+think of me walking on the hard pavements of New York?"
+
+"I shall think of you, yes," he said, failing to catch her
+merriment.
+
+"And lf you ever want a message from me," she continued, "you
+must look for it on your sacred laurel here on the hill by
+Hermes' grave.  It ls just possible, you know, that I shall be
+inside, and if I am, I shall speak to you through my leaves, when
+you wander that way."
+
+Something in the man's face warned her, and her voice became
+grave.
+
+"Why do you go?" she asked.
+
+"It is the only thing to do," he answered.  "Life has thrown me
+back into the old position, and I must face the same foes again.
+I always rush too eagerly to snatch my good; I always hit my head
+against some impassable wall.  I thought I had won my battles and
+was safe, and then you came."
+
+The life had gone out of his voice, the light from his face.
+Looking at him Daphne saw above his temples a touch of gray in
+the golden brown of his hair.
+
+"And then?" she asked softly.
+
+"Then my hard-won control vanished, and I felt that I could stake
+my hopes of heaven and my fears of hell to win you."
+
+"A Greek god, with thoughts of hell?" murmured Daphne.
+
+"Hell," he answered, "ls a feeling, not a place, as has often
+been observed.  I happen to be in it now, but it does not matter.
+Yes, I am going away, Daphne, Daphne.  You say that there are
+claims upon you that you cannot thrust aside.  I shall go, but in
+some life, some time, I shall find you again."
+
+Daphne looked at him with soft triumph in her eyes.  Secure in
+the possession of that letter on the table, she would not tell
+him yet!  This note of struggle gave deeper melody to the joyous
+music of the shepherd on the hills.
+
+"I asked you once about your life and all that had happened to
+you:  do you remember?" he inquired.  "I have never told you of
+my own.  Will you let me tell you now?"
+
+"If you do not tell too much and explain yourself away," she
+answered.
+
+"It is a story of tragedy, and of folly, recognized too late. I
+have never told it to any human being, but I should like you to
+understand.  It has been an easy life, so far as outer
+circumstances go.  Until I was eighteen I was lord and dictator
+in a household of women, spoiled by mother and sisters alike.
+Then came the grief of my life.  Oh, I cannot tell it, even to
+you!"
+
+The veins stood out on his forehead, and his face was indeed like
+the face of a tortured Saint Sebastian.  The girl's eyes were
+sweet with sympathy, and with something else that he did not look
+to see.
+
+"There was a plan made for a journey.  I opposed it for some
+selfish whim, for I had a scheme of my own.  They yielded to me
+as they always did, and took my way.  That day there was a
+terrible accident, and all who were dear to me were killed, while
+I, the murderer, was cursed with life.  So, when I was eighteen,
+my world was made up of four graves in the cemetery at Rome, and
+of that memory.  Whatever the world may say, I was as guilty of
+those deaths as if I had caused them by my own hand."
+
+He had covered his face with his palms, and his head was bent.
+The girl reached out as if to touch the rumpled brown hair with
+consoling fingers, then drew her hand back.  In a moment, when
+her courage came, he should know what share of comfort she was
+ready to give him.  Meanwhile, she hungered to make the farthest
+reach of his suffering her own.
+
+"Since then?" she asked softly.
+
+"Since then I have been trying to build my life up out of its
+ruins.  I have tried to win content and even gladness, for I hold
+that man should be master of himself, even of remorse for his old
+sins.  You see, I've been busy trying to find out people who had
+the same kind of misery, or some other kind, to face."
+
+"Shepherd of the wretched," said the girl dreamily.
+
+"Something like that," he answered.
+
+The girl's face was all a-quiver for pity of the tale; in
+listening to the story of his life she had completely forgotten
+her own. Then, before she knew what was happening, he rose
+abruptly and held out his hand.
+
+"Every minute that I stay makes matters harder," he said.  "I've
+got to go to see if I cannot win gladness even out of this, for
+still my gospel is the gospel of joy.  Good-by."
+
+Suddenly Daphne realized that he was gone!  She could hear his
+footsteps on the pebble-stones of the walk as he swung on with
+his long stride.  She started to run after him, then stopped.
+After all, how could she find words for what she had to say?
+Walking to the great gate by the highway she looked wistfully
+between its iron rods, for one last glimpse of him.  A sudden
+realization came to her that she knew nothing about him, not even
+an address, "except Delphi," she said whimsically to herself.
+Only a minute ago he had been there; and now she had wantonly let
+him go out of her life forever.
+
+"I wonder if the Madonna threw my roses away," she thought,
+coming back with slow feet to the arbor, and realizing for the
+first time since she had reached the Villa Accolanti that she was
+alone, and very far away from home.
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+San Pietro and Bertuccio were waiting at the doorway, both
+blinking sleepily in the morning air.  At San Pietro's right side
+hung a tiny pannier, covered by a fringed white napkin, above
+which lay a small flask decorated with corn husk and gay yarn,
+where red wine sparkled like rubies in the sunshine.  The varying
+degrees of the donkey's resignation were registered exactly in
+the changing angles at which his right ear was cocked.
+
+"Pronta!" called Assunta, who was putting the finishing touches
+on saddle and luncheon basket.  "If the Signorina means to climb
+the Monte Altiera she must start before the sun is high."
+
+On the hillside above Daphne heard, but her feet strayed only
+more slowly.  She was wandering with a face like that of a sky
+across which thin clouds scud, in the grass about Hermes' grave.
+In her hand was the letter of yesterday, and in her eyes the
+memory of the days before.
+
+"It is all too late," said Daphne, who had learned to talk aloud
+in this world where no one understood.  "The Greeks were right in
+thinking that our lives are ruled by mocking fate.  I wonder what
+angry goddess cast forgetfulness upon my mind, so that I forgot
+to tell Apollo what this letter says."
+
+Daphne looked to the open sky, but it gave no answer, and she
+paused by the laurel tree with head bent down.  Then, with a
+sudden, wistful little laugh, she held out the letter and
+fastened it to the laurel, tearing a hole in one corner to let a
+small bare twig go through.  With a blunt pencil she scribbled on
+it in large letters:  "Let Apollo read, if he ever wanders this
+way."
+
+"He will never find it," said the girl, "and the rain will come
+and soak it, and it will bleach in the sun.  But nobody else
+knows enough to read it, and I shall leave it there on his sacred
+tree, as my last offering.  I suppose there is some saving grace
+even in the sacrifices that go astray."
+
+Then she descended the hill, climbed upon San Pietro's back, and
+rode through the gateway.
+
+An hour later, Assunta, going to find a spade in the tool-house,
+for she was transplanting roses, came upon the Signorina's caller
+of yesterday standing near the tool-house with something in his
+hand.  The peasant woman's face showed neither awe nor fear; only
+lively curiosity gleamed in the blinking brown eyes.
+
+"Buon' giorno," said Apollo, exactly as mortals do.
+
+"Buon' giorno, Altezza," returned Assunta.
+
+"Is the Signorina at home?" asked the intruder.
+
+"But no!" cried Assunta.  "She has started to climb the very sky
+to-day, Monte Altiera, and for what I can't make out.  It only
+wears out Bertuccio's shoes and the asinetto's legs."
+
+"Grazia," said Apollo, moving away.
+
+"Does his Highness think that the Signorina resembles her sister,
+the Contessa?" asked the peasant woman for the sake of a
+detaining word.
+
+"Not at all," answered the visitor, and he passed into the open
+road.
+
+Then he turned over in his hand the letter which he had taken
+from the laurel.  Though he had read it thee times he hardly
+understood as yet, and his face was the face of one who sees that
+the incredible has come to pass.  The letter was made up of
+fifteen closely written pages, and it told the story of a young
+clergyman, who, convinced at last that celibacy and the shelter
+of the Roman priesthood were his true vocation, had, after long
+prayer and much mediation, decided to flee the snares of the
+world and to renounce its joys for the sake of bliss the other
+side of life.
+
+"When you receive this letter, my dear Daphne," wrote Eustace
+Denton, "I shall have been taken into the brotherhood of Saint
+Ambrose, for I wish to place myself in a position where there
+will be no retracing my steps."
+
+The face of the reader on the Roman hills, as it was lifted from
+the page again to the sunshine, was full of the needless pity of
+an alien faith.
+
+Along the white road that led up the mountain, and over the
+grass-grown path that climbed the higher slopes, trod a solitary
+traveler.  Now his step was swift, as if some invisible spirit of
+the wind were wafting him on; and again the pace was slow and his
+head bent, as if some deep thought stayed his speed.  There were
+green slopes above, green slopes below, and the world opened out
+as he climbed on and up.  Out and out sketched the great
+Campagne, growing wider at each step, with the gray, unbroken
+lines of aqueduct leading toward Rome and the shining sea beyond.
+
+
+* * * * * * * *
+
+On a great flat stone far up on the heights sat two motionless
+figures:  below them, partly veiling the lower world, floated a
+thin mist of cloud.
+
+"This must be Olympus," said Daphne.
+
+"Any mountain is Olympus that touches the sky," answered Apollo.
+
+"Where are the others?" demanded the girl.  "Am I not to know
+your divine friends?"
+
+"Don't you see them?" he asked as in surprise,--"Aphrodite just
+yonder in violet robe, and Juno, and Hermes with winged feet"--
+
+"I am afraid I am a wee bit blind, being but mortal," answered
+Daphne.  "I can see nothing but you."
+
+Beside them on the rock, spread out on oak leaves, lay clusters
+of purple grapes, six black ripe olives, and a little pile of
+biscotti Inglesi.  The girl bent and poured from the curving
+flask red wine that bubbled in the glass, then gave it to her
+companion, saying:  "Quick, before Hebe gets here," and the sound
+of their merriment rung down the hillside.
+
+"Hark!" whispered Daphne.  "I hear an echo of the unquenchable
+laughter of the gods!  They cannot be far away."
+
+From another stone near at hand Bertuccio watched them with eyes
+that feigned not to see.  Bertuccio did not understand English,
+but he understood everything else.  Goodly shares of the nectar
+and ambrosia of this feast had fallen to his lot, and Bertuccio
+in his own way was almost as happy as the lovers.  In the soft
+grass near San Pietro Martire nibbled peacefully, now and then
+lifting his eyes to see what was going on.  Once he brayed.  He
+alone, of all nature, seemed impervious to the joy that had
+descended upon earth.
+
+It was only an hour since Daphne had been overtaken.  Few words
+had sufficed for understanding, and Bertuccio had looked
+away.
+
+"My only fear was that I should find you turned into a laurel
+tree," said Apollo.  "I shall always be afraid of
+that."
+
+"Apollo," said Daphne irrelevantly, holding out to him a bunch of
+purple grapes in the palm of her hand, "there is a practical side
+to all this.  People will have to know, I am afraid.  I must
+write to my sister."
+
+"I have reason to think that the Countess Accolanti will not be
+displeased," he answered.  There was a queer little look about
+his mouth, but Daphne asked for no explanation.
+
+"There is your father," he suggested.
+
+"Oh!" said Daphne.  "He will love you at once.  His tastes and
+mine are very much alike."
+
+The lover-god smiled, quite satisfied.
+
+"You chose the steepest road of all to-day, little girl," he
+said. "But it is not half so long nor so hard as the one I
+expected to climb to find you."
+
+"You are tired!" said Daphne anxiously.  "Rest."
+
+Bertuccio was sleeping on his flat rock; San Pietro lay down for
+a brief, ascetic slumber.  The lovers sat side by side, with the
+mystery of beauty about them:  the purple and gold of nearness
+and distance; bright color of green grass near, sombre tint of
+cypress and stone pine afar.
+
+"I shall never really know whether you are a god or not," said
+Daphne dreamily.
+
+"A very proper attitude for a woman to have toward her husband,"
+he answered with a smile.  "I must try hard to live up to the
+character.  You will want to live on Olympus, and you really
+ought, if you are going to wear gowns woven of my sunbeams like
+the one you had on yesterday.  How shall I convince you that Rome
+must do part of the time?  You will want me to make you immortal:
+that always happens when a maiden marries a god."
+
+"I think you have done that already," said Daphne.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Daphne, an Autumn Pastoral,
+by Margaret Sherwood
+
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