"But you aren't a good interpreter, 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?."