Page:Daphne, an Autumn Pastoral.djvu/71

 "Everything does itself in this most lazy country," remarked Daphne. "Dresses make themselves, boots repair themselves, food eats itself. There's just one idiom, si fa,"—

"What?" asked Assunta.

"Reflections," answered the girl, smiling down on her. "Assunta, may I go and help pick grapes?"

"Ma che!" screamed the peasant woman, losing her balance in her sudden emotion and going down on her knees in the loosened soil. "The Signorina, the sister of the Contessa, go to pick grapes in the vineyard?"

"Si'" answered Daphne amiably. Her face was alive with laughter.

"But the Contessa would die of shame!" asserted Assunta, rising with bits of dirt clinging to her apron, and gesticulating with the knife. "It would be a scandal, and all the pickers would say, 'Behold the mad Englishwoman!