I won't let them be dead!"
Then she burst into tears, ran down the stairs, locked herself into her mother's stateroom, and did not appear again for several hours.
Katy laughed heartily at first over this outburst, but presently she began to repent and to think that she had treated her pet unkindly.
She went down and knocked at the stateroom door; but Amy would not answer.
She called her softly through the key-hole, and coaxed and pleaded, but it was all in vain.
Amy remained invisible till late in the afternoon; and when she finally crept up again to the deck, her eyes were red with crying, and her little face as pale and miserable as if she had been attending the funeral of her dearest friend.
Katy's heart smote her.
"Come here, my darling," she said, holding out her hand; "come and sit in my lap and forgive me.
Violet and Emma shall not be dead.
They shall go on living, since you care so much for them, and I will tell stories about them to the end of the CHAPTER."
"No," said Amy, shaking her head mournfully; "you can't.
They're dead, and they won't come to life again ever.
It's all over, and I'm so so-o-rry."
All Katy's apologies and efforts to resuscitate the story were useless.
Violet and Emma were dead to Amy's imagination, and she could not make herself believe in them any more.
She was too woe-begone to care for the fables of Circe and her swine which Katy told as they rounded the magnificent Cape Circello, and the isles where the sirens used to sing appealed to her in vain.
The sun set, the stars came out; and under the beams of their countless lamps and the beckonings of a slender new moon, the
"Marco Polo" sailed into the Bay of Naples, past Vesuvius, whose dusky curl of smoke could be seen outlined against the luminous sky, and brought her passengers to their landing-place.
They woke next morning to a summer atmosphere full of yellow sunshine and true July warmth.
Flower-vendors stood on every corner, and pursued each newcomer with their fragrant wares.
Katy could not stop exclaiming over the cheapness of the flowers, which were thrust in at the carriage windows as they drove slowly up and down the streets.
They were tied into flat nosegays, whose centre was a white camellia, encircled with concentric rows of pink tea rosebuds, ring after ring, till the whole was the size of an ordinary milk-pan; all to be had for the sum of ten cents!
But after they had bought two or three of these enormous bouquets, and had discovered that not a single rose boasted an inch of stem, and that all were pierced with long wires through their very hearts, she ceased to care for them.
"I would rather have one Souvenir or General Jacqueminot, with a long stem and plenty of leaves, than a dozen of these stiff platters of bouquets," Katy told Mrs. Ashe.
But when they drove beyond the city gates, and the coachman came to anchor beneath walls overhung with the same roses, and she found that she might stand on the seat and pull down as many branches of the lovely flowers as she desired, and gather wallflowers for herself out of the clefts in the masonry, she was entirely satisfied.
"This is the Italy of my dreams," she said.
With all its beauty there was an underlying sense of danger about Naples, which interfered with their enjoyment of it.
Evil smells came in at the windows, or confronted them as they went about the city. There seemed something deadly in the air.
Whispered reports met their ears of cases of fever, which the landlords of the hotels were doing their best to hush up.
An American gentleman was said to be lying very ill at one house. A lady had died the week before at another.
Mrs. Ashe grew nervous.
"We will just take a rapid look at a few of the principal things," she told Katy, "and then get away as fast as we can.
Amy is so on my mind that I have no peace of my life.
I keep feeling her pulse and imagining that she does not look right; and though I know it is all my fancy, I am impatient to be off.
You won't mind, will you, Katy?"
After that everything they did was done in a hurry.
Katy felt as if she were being driven about by a cyclone, as they rushed from one sight to another, filling up all the chinks between with shopping, which was irresistible where everything was so pretty and so wonderfully cheap.
She herself purchased a tortoise-shell fan and chain for Rose Red, and had her monogram carved upon it; a coral locket for Elsie; some studs for Dorry; and for her father a small, beautiful vase of bronze, copied from one of the Pompeian antiques.
"How charming it is to have money to spend in such a place as this!" she said to herself with a sigh of satisfaction as she surveyed these delightful buyings.
"I only wish I could get ten times as many things and take them to ten times as many people.
Papa was so wise about it.
I can't think how it is that he always knows beforehand exactly how people are going to feel, and what they will want!"
Mrs. Ashe also bought a great many things for herself and Amy, and to take home as presents; and it was all very pleasant and satisfactory except for that subtle sense of danger from which they could not escape and which made them glad to go.
"See Naples and die," says the old adage; and the saying has proved sadly true in the case of many an American traveller.
Beside the talk of fever there was also a good deal of gossip about brigands going about, as is generally the case in Naples and its vicinity.
Something was said to have happened to a party on one of the heights above Sorrento; and though nobody knew exactly what the something was, or was willing to vouch for the story, Mrs. Ashe and Katy felt a good deal of trepidation as they entered the carriage which was to take them to the neighborhood where the mysterious "something" had occurred.
The drive between Castellamare and Sorrento is in reality as safe as that between Boston and Brookline; but as our party did not know this fact till afterward, it did them no good.
It is also one of the most beautiful drives in the world, following the windings of the exquisite coast mile after mile, in long links of perfectly made road, carved on the face of sharp cliffs, with groves of oranges and lemons and olive orchards above, and the Bay of Naples beneath, stretching away like a solid sheet of lapis-lazuli, and gemmed with islands of the most picturesque form.
It is a pity that so much beauty should have been wasted on Mrs. Ashe and Katy, but they were too frightened to half enjoy it.
Their carriage was driven by a shaggy young savage, who looked quite wild enough to be a bandit himself.