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