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?"
On the second day of the rain Daphne saw that the flock had come near the house. From the dining-room window she could see the sheep, with water soaking into their thick wool. Some one was guarding them. With little streams dashing from the drooping felt hat to the sheepskin clad shoulders, the keeper stood, motionless in the pelting rain. The sheep ate greedily the wet, juicy grass, while the shepherd leaned on his staff and watched. Undoubtedly it was Antoli's peasant successor, Daphne thought, as she stood with her face to the dripping window pane. Then the shepherd turned, and she recognized, under the wet hat brim, the glowing color and undaunted smile of her masquerading god. Whether he saw her or not she could not tell, but she stood by the storm-washed window in her scarlet house gown and watched, longing to give him shelter.