"Please do," said Irma. "Ellen says you will be only a few doors away. Good-by, good-by," she concluded, as Richard helped his mother and Ellen and Katie into a gondola, where they sat rather stiffly with their bags piled up behind them in the stern.
"Is it what you expected?" asked Aunt Caroline, as they glided in their own gondola over the Grand Canal.
"Yes," sighed Irma; "it's more than I expected. I know that I shall be perfectly happy in Venice."
But although Venice did not disappoint Irma, many things in this Queen of the Adriatic were different from her expectations. She soon discovered that it was possible to walk almost as far in Venice as in any other large city, provided you did not object to threading your way sometimes through narrow passages and over curving bridges.
"Has any one ever counted the bridges in Venice?" she asked one day. "There must be hundreds of them," she said on the second day of her stay there, when she and Marion had had a long walk that had ended in the great Piazza in front of San Marco.
"Some one has counted them, of course, but I can only guess that there are several hundred. But here we are at the heart of Venice. Isn't it great?"
"Yes, this is just what I expected; it is almost too beautiful to be real," and Irma stood in front of the great church with its gilded domes, its mosaic pictures, and the four bronze horses from Constantinople, over the main entrance, forming, as a whole, a picture of which the eye could never weary.
"Let us not go inside to-day," said Marion.
"Oh, I would rather get a general impression of the piazza. That beautiful building, white and yellow, must be the Doge's Palace. Ah, yes, and there is the Lion of St. Mark's on his column. But who is that odd-looking saint on the other column, standing on a crocodile?"