"Ecco!" said Assunta, pointing to the wine jar from which she had been filling the bottle in her hand. "The holy cross! Does the Signorina see it?" "Si," said Daphne. "And here also?" asked Assunta, pointing to another. The girl nodded doubtfully. Two irregular scratches could, by imaginative vision, be translated into a cross. "As on every one, Signorina," said Assunta triumphantly. "And nobody puts it there. It comes by itself." "Really?" asked the girl. "Veramente," replied the peasant woman. "It has to, and not only here, but everywhere. You see, years and years ago, there were heathen spirits in the wine, and they made trouble when our Lord came. I have heard that the jars burst and the wine was wasted because the god of the wine was angry that the real God was born. And it lasted till San Pietro came and exorcised the wicked spirit, and he put a cross on a wine jar to keep him away. Since then every wine jar bears somewhere the sign of the cross." "What became of the poor god?" asked Daphne. "He fled, I suppose to hell," answered Assunta piously. "Poor heathen gods!" murmured Daphne. 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. What did a Greek god do when sunshine disappeared? she wondered. Or had the god of the sun gone away altogether, and was this deluge the result? The shepherd Antoli had been taken home, Giacomo assured her, but he was exceedingly reticent when asked who was herding the sheep, only shrugging his shoulders with a "Chi lo sa?"