sunta, 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 pict