in strange costumes and attitudes, who all looked as though they had stepped out of pictures, but who were in reality models waiting for artists to come by and engage them. No matter what it was - a bit of oddly-tinted masonry with a tuft of brown and orange wall-flowers hanging upon it, or a vegetable stall where endive and chicory and curly lettuces were arranged in wreaths with tiny orange gourds and scarlet peppers for points of colour - it was all Rome, and, by virtue of that word, different from any other place - more suggestive, more interesting, ten times more mysterious than any other could possibly be, so Katy thought.

This fact consoled her for everything and anything - for the fleas, the dirt, for the queer things they had to eat and the still queerer odours they were forced to smell! Nothing seemed of any particular consequence except the deep sense of enjoyment, and the newly-discovered world of thought and sensation of which she had become suddenly conscious.

The only drawback to her happiness, as the days went on, was that little Amy did not seem quite well. She had taken a cold on the journey from Naples, and though it did not seem serious, that, or something, made her look pale and thin. Her mother said she was growing fast, but the explanation did not quite account for the wistful look in the child's eyes and the tired feeling of which she continually complained. Mrs Ashe, with vague uneasiness, began to talk of cutting short their Roman stay and getting Amy off to the more bracing air of Florence. But meanwhile there was the carnival close at hand, which they must by no means miss, and the feeling that their opportunity might be a brief one made her and Katy all the more anxious to make the very most of their time. So they filled the days full with sights to see and things to do, and came and went, sometimes taking Amy with them, but more often leaving her at the hotel under the care of a kind German chambermaid, who spoke pretty good English and to whom Amy had taken a fancy.

`The marble things are so cold, and the old broken things make me so sorry,' she explained, `and I hate beggars because they are dirty, and the stairs make my back ache; and I'd a great deal rather stay with Maria and go up on the roof, if you don't mind, Mamma.'

This roof, which Amy had chosen as a play-place covered the whole of the great hotel, and had been turned into a sort of upper-air garden by the simple process of gravelling it all over, placing trellises of ivy here and there, and setting tubs of oranges and oleanders and boxes of gay geraniums and stock- gillyflowers on the balustrades. A tame fawn was tethered there. And adopted him as a playmate, and what with his company and that of the flowers, the times when her mother and Katy were absent from her passed not unhappily.

Katy always repaired to the roof as soon as they cam in from their long mornings and afternoons of sight seeing. Years afterward, she would remember with contrition how pathetically glad Amy always was to see her She would put her little head on Katy's breast and hold her tight for many minutes without saying a word. When she did speak it was always about the house and the garden that she talked. She never asked any questions a to where Katy had been, or what she had done; it seemed to tire her to think about it.

`I should be very lonely sometimes if it were not for my dear little fawn,' she told Katy once. `He is so sweet that don't miss you and mamma very much while I have him to play with. I call him Florio - don't you think that is; pretty name? I like to stay with him a great deal better than to go about with you to those nasty-smelling old churches, with fleas hopping all over them!'

So Amy was left in peace with her fawn, and the other made haste to see all they could before the time came t go to Florence.

Katy realized one of the `moments' for which she had come to Europe when she stepped for the first time on the balcony, overhanging the Corso, which Mrs Ashe had hired in company with some acquaintances made at the hotel, and looked down at the ebb and surge of the just-begun carnival. The narrow street seemed humming with people of all sorts and conditions. Some were masked, some were not. There