one evening from the Lido, reported having recognized the huge outline
of the Ibis among the pleasure craft of the outer harbour; and the very
next evening, as the guests of Palazzo Vanderlyn were sipping their ices
at Florian's, the Hickses loomed up across the Piazza.

Susy pleaded in vain with her husband in defence of his privacy.
"Remember you're here to write, dearest; it's your duty not to let any
one interfere with that. Why shouldn't we tell them we're just leaving!"

"Because it's no use: we're sure to be always meeting them. And besides,
I'll be hanged if I'm going to shirk the Hickses. I spent five whole
months on the Ibis, and if they bored me occasionally, India didn't."

"We'll make them take us to Aquileia anyhow," said Strefford
philosophically; and the next moment the Hickses were bearing down on
the defenceless trio.

They presented a formidable front, not only because of their mere
physical bulk--Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were equally and majestically
three-dimensional--but because they never moved abroad without the
escort of two private secretaries (one for the foreign languages), Mr.
Hicks's doctor, a maiden lady known as Eldoradder Tooker, who was Mrs.
Hicks's cousin and stenographer, and finally their daughter, Coral
Hicks.

Coral Hicks, when Susy had last encountered the party, had been a
fat spectacled school-girl, always lagging behind her parents, with a
reluctant poodle in her wake. Now the poodle had gone, and his mistress
led the procession. The fat school-girl had changed into a young lady
of compact if not graceful outline; a long-handled eyeglass had replaced
the spectacles, and through it, instead of a sullen glare, Miss Coral
Hicks projected on the world a glance at once confident and critical.
She looked so strong and so assured that Susy, taking her measure in
a flash, saw that her position at the head of the procession was not
fortuitous, and murmured inwardly: "Thank goodness she's not pretty
too!"

If she was not pretty, she was well-dressed; and if she was
overeducated, she seemed capable, as Strefford had suggested, of
carrying off even this crowning disadvantage. At any rate, she was above
disguising it; and before the whole party had been seated five minutes
in front of a fresh supply of ices (with Eldorada and the secretaries
at a table slightly in the background) she had taken up with Nick the
question of exploration in Mesopotamia.

"Queer child, Coral," he said to Susy