"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 Assunta, rising
with bits of dirt clinging to her apron, and gesticulating with