ves of
beauty, and the crimson wine caught the sunlight in a thousand ways.
Bending over, she poured it out slowly on the green grass.

"A libation to Apollo," she said, not without reverence.

CHAPTER VIII

"I shall call you," said Daphne to the lamb on the fourth day of his
life with her, "I shall call you Hermes, because you go so fast."

Very fast indeed he went. By garden path, or on the slopes below the
villa, he followed her with swift gallop, interrupted by many jumps and
gambols, and much frisking of his tail. If he lost himself in his
wayward pursuit of his mistress, a plaintive bleat summoned her to his
side. On the marble stairs of the villa, even in the sacred precincts
of the salon, she heard the tinkle of his hard little hoofs, and she
had no courage to turn him back. He bleated so piteously outside the
door when his lady dined that at last he won the desire of his heart
and lapped milk from a bowl on the floor at her side as she ate her
salad or broke her grapes.

"What scandal!" muttered Giacomo every time he brought the bowl. The
Contessa would discharge him if she knew! But he always remembered,
even if Daphne forgot, and meekly dried the milk from his sleek black
trousers whenever Hermes playfully dashed his hoof, instead of his
nose, into the bowl. As Giacomo explained to Assunta in the kitchen,
it was for the Signorina, and the Signorina was very lonely.

She was less lonely with Hermes, for he spoke her language.

"It is almost time to hear from Eustace," Daphne told him one day, as
she sat on a stone under an olive tree in the orchard below the house.
Hermes stood before her, his head down, his tail dejectedly drooped.

"Perhaps," she added, dreamily looking up at the blue sky through its
broken veil of gray-green olive leaves, "perhaps he does not want me
back, and the letter will tell me so."

Hermes gave an incredible jump high in the air, lighted on his four
feet, pranced, gamboled, curveted.

"It is very hard to know one's duty or to do it, Hermes," said Daphne,
patting his woolly brow. Hermes intimated, by means of frisking legs
and tail, that he would not try.

"I believe you are bewitched," said the girl, suddenly taking him up in
her arms. "I believe you are some little changeling god sent by your
master Apollo to put his thoughts into my head."

He squirmed, and she put him down. Then she gave him a harmless slap
on his fleecy side.

"But you aren't a good i