CORINNA WONDERS After a winter of Italian skies spring had come in a night.

It was a morning in April, blue and soft as a cloud, with a roving fragrance of lilacs and hyacinths in the air.

Already the early bloom of the orchard had dropped, and the freshly ploughed fields, with splashes of henna in the dun-coloured soil, were surrounded by the budding green of the woods.
As Mrs.Culpeper knocked at the door of Corinna's shop, she noticed that the pine bough in the window had been replaced by bowls of growing narcissi.

For a moment her stern expression relaxed, and her face, framed in a bonnet of black straw with velvet strings, became soft and anxious.

Beneath the veil of white illusion which reached only to the tip of her small sharp nose, her eyes were suddenly touched with spring.
"How delicious the flowers smell," she remarked when Corinna opened the door; and then, as she entered the room and glanced curiously round her, she asked incredulously, "Do people really pay money for these old illustrations, Corinna ?" "Not here, Cousin Harriet.