s 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 As