nterpreter, 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 she