The sunshine, flooding the little room, fell full on her face,
and made red lights in her brown hair.

"There was a god of the sun, too, named Apollo," she said,
warming her hands in level rays. " Was he banished too?"

Assunta shrugged her shoulders.

"Who knows? They dare not show their faces here since the Holy
Father has blessed the land."

Hermes bleated at the door, and the trio descended the hill
together, Assunta carrying a basket of grapes and a bottle of
yellow oil, Daphne with a slender flask of red wine in her hand.

The next day the heavens opened, and rain poured down. The
cascades above the villa became spouting waterfalls; the narrow
path beside them a leaping brook. The rain had not the steady
and persistent motion of well-conducted rain; it came in sheets,
blown by sudden gusts against the windows, or driven in wild
spurts among the cypresses. The world from the villa windows
seemed one blur of watery green, with a thin gray veil of mist to
hide it.

Daphne paced the mosaic floors in idleness, or spelled out the
meaning of Petrarchan sonnets in an old vellum copy she had found
in the library. Sometimes she sat brooding in one of the faded
gilt and crimson chairs in the salon, by the diminutive fireplace
where two or three tiny twigs burned out their lives in an
Italian thought of heat.