"It was a thousand times better! And the best of it is my eyes are as well as ever.

I needn't be afraid, now, of that 'long night' that haunted me like a bad dream." All during dinner Fidelia kept looking across at the merry party sitting at the next table, and wished she could be with them.

She could not help hearing all they said, for they were only a few feet away, and there was no one talking at the table where she sat.

The boys were in the children's dining-room with Fanchette, and her mother was spending the evening with some friends at the new hotel across the way.
"I'm going to make believe that I'm one of them," the lonely child said to herself, smiling as she caught a friendly nod from Betty.

So she listened eagerly to Mr.Forbes's account of their visit to Venice, and to the volcano of Vesuvius, and laughed with the others over the amusing experiences Betty and Eugenia had in Norway with a chambermaid who could not understand them, and in Holland with an old Dutch market-woman, the day they became separated from Mr.Forbes, and were lost for several hours.
Fidelia's salad almost choked her, there was such an ache in her throat when she heard them planning an excursion for the next day.