He squirmed, and she put him down. Then she gave him a harmless slap on his fleecy side. "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?" "Si," said Assunta, marveling at the patois that the Signorina spoke, and wondering if it contained Indian words. The very sight of the rows of utensils on the kitchen walls deepened the rebellious mood of this descendant of the Puritans. "Even the pots and pans have lovely shapes," said Daphne wistfully, for the slender necks, the winning curves, the lines of shallow bowl and basin bore testimony to the fact that the meanest thought of this people was a thought of beauty. "I wonder why the Lord gave to them the curve, to us the angle?" When the macaroni was finished, Assunta invited the Signorina to go with her to a little house set by itself on the sloping hill back of the kitchen. "E carin', eh?" demanded Assunta, as she opened the door. Fragrance met them at the threshold, fragrance of fruit and of honey. The warm sun poured in through the dirty, cobwebbed window when Assunta lifted the shade. Ranged on shelves along the wall stood bottles of yellow oil; partly buried in the ground were numerous jars of wine, bottles and jars both keeping the beautiful Etruscan curves. On shallow racks were spread bunches of yellow and of purple grapes, and golden combs of honey gleamed from dusky corners.