Chapter XI.

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      Lieut. Worthington’s leave had nearly expired. He must rejoin his ship; but he waited till the last possible moment in order to help his sister through the move to Albano, where it had been decided that Amy should go for a few days of hill air before undertaking the longer journey to Florence.

      It was a perfect morning in late March when the pale little invalid was carried in her uncle’s strong arms, and placed in the carriage which was to take them to the old town on the mountain slopes which they had seen shining from far away for so many weeks past. Spring had come in her fairest shape to Italy. The Campagna had lost its brown and tawny hues and taken on a tinge of fresher color. The olive orchards were budding thickly. Almond boughs extended their dazzling shapes across the blue sky. Arums and acanthus and ivy filled every hollow, roses nodded from over every gate, while a carpet of violets and cyclamen and primroses stretched over the fields and freighted every wandering wind with fragrance.

      When once the Campagna with its long line of aqueducts, arches, and hoary tombs was left behind, and the carriage slowly began to mount the gradual rises of the hill, Amy revived. With every breath of the fresher air her eyes seemed to brighten and her voice to grow stronger. She held Mabel up to look at the view; and the sound of her laugh, faint and feeble as it was, was like music to her mother’s ears.

      Amy wore a droll little silk-lined cap on her head, over which a downy growth of pale-brown fuzz was gradually thickening. Already it showed a tendency to form into tiny rings, which to Amy, who had always hankered for curls, was an extreme satisfaction. Strange to say, the same thing exactly had happened to Mabel; her hair had grown out into soft little round curls also! Uncle Ned and Katy had ransacked Rome for this baby-wig, which filled and realized all Amy’s hopes for her child. On the same excursion they had bought the materials for the pretty spring suit which Mabel wore, for it had been deemed necessary to sacrifice most of her wardrobe as a concession to possible fever-germs. Amy admired the pearl-colored dress and hat, the fringed jacket and little lace-trimmed parasol so much, that she was quite consoled for the loss of the blue velvet costume and ermine muff which had been the pride of her heart ever since they left Paris, and whose destruction they had scarcely dared to confess to her.

      So up, up, up, they climbed till the gateway of the old town was passed, and the carriage stopped before a quaint building once the residence of the Bishop of Albano, but now known as the Hôtel de la Poste. Here they alighted, and were shown up a wide and lofty staircase to their rooms, which were on the sunny side of the house, and looked across a walled garden, where roses and lemon trees grew beside old fountains guarded by sculptured lions and heathen divinities with broken noses and a scant supply of fingers and toes, to the Campagna, purple with distance and stretching miles and miles away to where Rome sat on her seven hills, lifting high the Dome of St. Peter’s into the illumined air.

      Nurse Swift said that Amy must go to bed at once, and have a long rest. But Amy nearly wept at the proposal, and declared that she was not a bit tired and couldn’t sleep if she went to bed ever so much. The change of air had done her good already, and she looked more like herself than for many weeks past. They compromised their dispute on a sofa, where Amy, well wrapped up, was laid, and where, in spite of her protestations, she presently fell asleep, leaving the others free to examine and arrange their new quarters.

      Such enormous rooms as they were! It was quite a journey to go from one side of them to another. The floors were of stone, with squares of carpet laid down over them, which looked absurdly small for the great spaces they were supposed to cover. The beds and tables were of the usual size, but they seemed almost like doll furniture because the chambers were so big. A quaint old paper, with an enormous pattern of banyan trees and pagodas, covered the walls, and every now and then betrayed by an oblong of regular cracks the existence of a hidden door, papered to look exactly like the rest of the wall.

      These mysterious doors made Katy nervous, and she never rested till she had opened every one of them and explored the places they led to. One gave access to a queer little bathroom. Another led, through a narrow dark passage, to a sort of balcony or loggia overhanging the garden. A third ended in a dusty closet with an artful chink in it from which you could peep into what had been the Bishop’s drawing-room but which was now turned into the dining-room of the hotel. It seemed made for purposes of espial; and Katy had visions of a long line of reverend prelates with their ears glued to the chink, overhearing what was being said about them in the apartment beyond.

      The most surprising of all she did not discover till she was going to bed on the second night after their arrival, when she thought she knew all about the mysterious doors and what they led to. A little unexplained draught of wind made her candle flicker, and betrayed the existence of still another door so cunningly hid in the wall pattern that she had failed to notice it. She had quite a creepy feeling as she drew her dressing-gown about her, took a light, and entered the narrow passage into which it opened. It was not a long passage, and ended presently in a tiny oratory. There was a little marble altar, with a kneeling-step and candlesticks and a great crucifix above. Ends of wax candles still remained in the candlesticks, and bunches of dusty paper flowers filled the vases which stood on either side of them. A faded silk cushion lay on the step. Doubtless the Bishop had often knelt there. Katy felt as if she were the first person to enter the place since he went away. Her common-sense told her that in a hotel bedroom constantly occupied by strangers for years past, some one must have discovered the door and found the little oratory before her; but common-sense is sometimes less satisfactory than romance. Katy liked to think that she was the first, and to “make believe” that no one else knew about it; so she did so, and invented legends about the place which Amy considered better than any fairy story.

      Before he left them Lieutenant Worthington had a talk with his sister in the garden. She rather forced this talk upon him, for various things were lying at her heart about which she longed for explanation; but he yielded so easily to her wiles that it was evident he was not averse to the idea.

      “Come, Polly, don’t beat about the bush any longer,” he said at last, amused and a little irritated at her half-hints and little feminine finesses. “I know what you want to ask; and as there’s no use making a secret of it, I will take my turn in asking. Have I any chance, do you think?”

      “Any chance?—about Katy, do you mean? Oh, Ned, you make me so happy.”

      “Yes; about her, of course.”

      “I don’t see why you should say ‘of course,’” remarked his sister, with the perversity of her sex, “when it’s only five or six weeks ago that I was lying awake at night for fear you were being gobbled up by that Lilly Page.”

      “There was a little risk of it,” replied her brother, seriously. “She’s awfully pretty and she dances beautifully, and the other fellows were all wild about her, and—well, you know yourself how such things go. I can’t see now what it was that I fancied so much about her, I don’t suppose I could have told exactly at the time; but I can tell without the smallest trouble what it is in—the other.”

      “In