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+Project Gutenberg's Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral, by Margaret Pollock Sherwood
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral
+
+Author: Margaret Pollock Sherwood
+
+Posting Date: March 23, 2009 [EBook #2438]
+Release Date: December, 2000
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAPHNE, AN AUTUMN PASTORAL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Stephanie L. Johnson.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+hill 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-because-
+it-is-a-most-beautiful-day.-She-returns-to-dine-at-six-and-wishes-
+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 I 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
+
+It 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.
+
+"If 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 lo 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-Italian 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 I 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?"
+
+"If 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 if 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 is
+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, "is 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 the Project Gutenberg EBook of Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral, by 
+Margaret Pollock Sherwood
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