"Why, you silly thing!" cried the outraged Amy; "do you suppose for one moment that my child could hurt your dirty old dolly? You ought to be glad to have her noticed at all by anybody that's clean."
The sound of the foreign tongue completed the discomfiture of the little Italian. With a shriek she fled, and all the other children after her; pausing at a distance to look back at the alarming creatures who didn't speak the familiar language. Katy, wishing to leave a pleasant impression, made Mabel kiss her waxen fingers toward them. This sent the children off into another fit of laughter and chatter, and they followed our friends for quite a distance as they proceeded on their way to the hotel.
All that night, over a sea as smooth as glass, the "Marco Polo" slipped along the coasts past which the ships of Ulysses sailed in those old legendary days which wear so charmed a light to our modern eyes. Katy roused at three in the morning, and looking from her cabin window had a glimpse of an island, which her map showed her must be Elba, where that war-eagle Napoleon was chained for a while. Then she fell asleep again, and when she roused in full daylight the steamer was off the coast of Ostia and nearing the mouth of the Tiber. Dreamy mountain-shapes rose beyond the far-away Campagna, and every curve and indentation of the coast bore a name which recalled some interesting thing.
About eleven a dim-drawn bubble appeared on the horizon, which the captain assured them was the dome of St. Peter's, nearly thirty miles distant. This was one of the "moments" which Clover had been fond of speculating about; and Katy, contrasting the real with the imaginary moment, could not help smiling. Neither she nor Clover had ever supposed that her first glimpse of the great dome was to be so little impressive.
On and on they went till the air-hung bubble disappeared; and Amy, grown very tired of scenery with which she had no associations, and grown-up raptures which she did not comprehend, squeezed herself into the end of the long wooden settee on which Katy sat, and began to beg for another story concerning Violet and Emma.
"Just a little tiny CHAPTER, you know, Miss Katy, about what they did on New Year's Day or something. It's so dull to keep sailing and sailing all day and have nothing to do, and it's ever so long since you told me anything about them, really and truly it is!"
Now, Violet and Emma, if the truth is to be told, had grown to be the bane of Katy's existence. She had rung the changes on their uneventful adventures, and racked her brains to invent more and more details, till her imagination felt like a dry sponge from which every possible drop of moisture had been squeezed. Amy was insatiable. Her interest in the tale never flagged; and when her exhausted friend explained that she really could not think of another word to say on the subject, she would turn the tables by asking, "Then, Miss Katy, mayn't I tell you a CHAPTER?" whereupon she would proceed somewhat in this fashion:—
"It was the day before Christmas—no, we won't have it the day before Christmas; it shall be three days before Thanksgiving. Violet and Emma got up in the morning, and—well, they didn't do anything in particular that day. They just had their breakfasts and dinners, and played and studied a little, and went to bed early, you know, and the next morning —well, there didn't much happen that day, either; they just had their breakfasts and dinners, and played."
Listening to Amy's stories was so much worse than telling them to her, that Katy in self-defence was driven to recommence her narrations, but she had grown to hate Violet and Emma with a deadly hatred. So when Amy made this appeal on the steamer's deck, a sudden resolution took possession of her, and she decided to put an end to these dreadful children once for all.
"Yes, Amy," she said, "I will tell you one more story about Violet and Emma; but this is positively the last."