The day was a true one of the freakish month. In the morning hours the clouds had played their many games, now gambolling on the blue in fleecy flocks, now rolling sublimely in great white billows or tumbling in darker shapes that shed big drops of rain. But the present hour was one of purest sky, and all the land was gloried in sunshine. Mysterious heralds of the springtime spoke to the spirit and senses of the younger riders. The river was in gentler mood; the grey brush of the poplars no longer strained in the wind, maple twigs were dimpling with buds, and the green mantle of the hills seemed to grow brighter with every glance. Their cheeks were smoothed by the new breath that comes stealing over the land in April days. They talked of the things about them. Hera rejoiced in the life of the outer air. She knew the wild growths and the architecture of the birds, and he, if saddened easily by the ugliness men impart to life, was ever awake to the beauties of the world. They saw here and there a last year’s nest in the leafing branches. “There was the home of an ortolan,” she would say, or, “There a blackbird lived, there a thrush.” “And soon, when passing Villa Barbiondi,” he added once, “a friend may say, ‘There Donna Hera lived.’” “Yes,” she said; “I shall part from the dear old nest, as the birds part from theirs.” Where the road branched upward to the dairy Don Riccardo and his sister were waiting. Together the four made the ascent of the zigzag way, passing under oaks that had clung to their brown leaves through all the assaults of winter and moving beneath the mournful green of the needle-pines. They walked about the scrupulously clean, well-ordered houses and yards of the Social Dairy, where moral enlightenment and manual energy worked in concert. It was one of the several hundred places, Mario told them, that the new, industrial plan had brought into being. He explained the genius of co-operation, and how in this instance it brightened the lives of thousands of poor farmers. Hera remarked the air of well-being that pervaded the place--the neat apparel of the men and women, the interest they showed in their work, and the absence from their eyes of the driven look she had observed in a factory of Milan. “How bright and fresh and--happy they are!” she said to Mario. “They are not overworked,” he explained. “They have only themselves and their families to provide for.” “I see nothing unusual in that,” observed Donna Beatrice. “I mean,” Mario went on, “that there are no ladies and gentlemen to be fed and clothed out of the profits of their work. That makes it possible for them to earn in seven hours a day enough for their needs and a little to spare for the bank--the bank that gives them an interest in the earnings of their deposits.”