A wreath of flowers from Rome, all gauze and spangles, will I lay at
the shrine of our Lady, and there shall be a long red ribbon to say my
thanks in letters of gold."

The hope of the house was presented to the Signorina after breakfast.
He was a broad-shouldered, round-headed offshoot of Italian soil, with
honest brown eyes like those of both father and mother. It was a face
to be trusted, Daphne knew, and when, recovering from the embarrassment
caused by his parents' pride in him, he blurted out the fact that he
had already been to the village that morning to find a little donkey
for the Signorina's wider journeyings, the girl welcomed the plan with
delight. Grinning with pride Bertuccio disappeared among the stables,
and presently returned, leading an asinetto. It was a little,
dun-colored thing, wearing a red-tasseled bridle and a small sheepskin
saddle with red girth, but all the gay trappings could not soften the
old primeval sadness of the donkey's face, under his long, questioning
ears. So Daphne won palfrey and cavalier.

In the succeeding days the two jogged for hours together over the
mountain roads. Now they followed some grassy path climbing gently
upward to the site of a buried town, where only mound and gray fragment
of stone marked garden and forum. Here was a bit of wall, with a touch
of gay painting mouldering on an inner surface,--Venus, in robe of red,
rising from a daintily suggested sea in lines of green. They gathered
fragments of old mosaic floor in their hands, blue lapis lazuli, yellow
bits of giallo antico, red porphyry, trodden by gay feet and sad,
unnumbered years ago. They found broken pieces of iridescent glass
that had fallen, perhaps, from shattered wine cups of the emperors, and
all these treasures Bertuccio stored away in his wide pockets. Again,
they climbed gracious heights and looked down over slopes and valleys,
where deep grass grew over rich, crumbling earth, deposit of dead
volcanoes, or saw, circled by soft green hills, some mountain lake,
reflecting the perfect blue of Italian sky.

Bertuccio usually walked behind; Daphne rode on ahead, with the sun
burning her cheeks, and the air, fragrant with the odor of late
ripening grapes on the upper hillsides, bringing intoxication. She
seemed to herself so much a thing of falling rain, rich earth, and
wakening sunshines that she would not have been surprised to find the
purple bloom of those same grapes gathering on her chee