Immediately everybody in the room began to talk loudly, which so frightened Mrs. Sprague that she took out her purse and asked, "How much?"
The boy held up four fingers. "Quattro lire," he said.
"Four lire!" exclaimed Edith indignantly; "that is almost one dollar, and it isn't worth ten cents."
But the excited Italian voices were all speaking at once, and so angrily that Mrs. Sprague dropped the money into an old chair, and seizing the flag with one hand and Edith with the other, she backed quickly out into the open air.
She forgot that she knew nothing about the way to her hotel, and, without waiting for the boy, crossed the first bridge she saw, and struck into another narrow lane. She was too anxious as to her whereabouts to notice the interesting sights in the streets through which she hurried; but Edith, with a girl's curiosity, saw everything.
In a small square at one end of a bridge, a woman leaned from an upper window and lowered a basket to the pavement below. A man with a basket of fried fish on his arm took a piece of money from the woman's basket and put in its place a fish from his own. Then he returned to a little shed near-by, where a woman was frying onions and fish in oil, on several charcoal stoves.
As they crossed another bridge, they saw a woman lean from a window to splash her baby up and down in the canal for his daily bath. The baby was tied to the end of a long rope which his mother gently raised and lowered, and he laughed with glee every time he hit the water with his chubby fists.
Edith wished to stop and watch this curious bath, but Mrs. Sprague hurried her along, and they soon reached a part of the city where many people were moving toward a church. As they neared the building, the leather curtain, which hangs at the entrance to Italian churches, was pushed aside, and a stream of men, women and children began coming out, each one carrying a candle.
The children had little candles, the grown people carried larger ones; and everyone stopped to buy cakes from old women seated near the church door.
After crossing many bridges, and passing many churches, Edith and her mother suddenly entered the Piazza of St. Mark, which had grown so familiar to them both that it was like walking into their own home.