uresque 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 o