"What is the matter?" asked Katy, in amazement.
"Oh, Katy, I am so glad you have come," cried poor Mrs. Ashe. "I can
hardly understand a word that this horrible woman says, but I think she
wants to turn us out of the hotel, and that we shall take Amy to some
other place. It would be the death of her,--I know it would. I never,
never will go, unless the doctor says it is safe. I oughtn't to,--I
couldn't; she can't make me, can she, Katy?"
"Madame," said Katy,--and there was a flash in her eyes before which the
landlady rather shrank,--"what is all this? Why do you come to trouble
madame while her child is so ill?"
Then came another torrent of explanation which didn't explain; but Katy
gathered enough of the meaning to make out that Mrs. Ashe was quite
correct in her guess, and that Madame Frulini was requesting, nay,
insisting, that they should remove Amy from the hotel at once. There
were plenty of apartments to be had now that the Carnival was over, she
said,--her own cousin had rooms close by,--it could easily be arranged,
and people were going away from the Del Mondo every day because there
was fever in the house. Such a thing could not be, it should not
be,--the landlady's voice rose to a shriek, "the child must go!"
"You are a cruel woman," said Katy, indignantly, when she had grasped
the meaning of the outburst. "It is wicked, it is cowardly, to come thus
and attack a poor lady under your roof who has so much already to bear.
It is her only child who is lying in there,--her only one, do you
understand, madame?--and she is a widow.
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