"I hope you haven't missed very much, then,--not anything that you'll be regretting in the years to come."
"Oh, regret is never going to be a specialty of mine," declared Kate. "To-morrow's the chance! I shall never be able to do much with yesterday, no matter how wise I become."
"Right you are!" said Wander sharply. "The only thing is that you don't know quite the full bearing of your remark--and I do."
She laughed sympathetically.
"Truth is truth," she said.
"Yes." He hung over the obvious aphorism boyishly. "Yes, truth is truth, no matter who utters it."
"Thanks, kind sir."
"Oh, I was thinking of the excellent Clarinda Hays. I listened to your conversation this morning and it seemed to me that she was giving you about all the truth you could find bins for. I couldn't help but take it in, it was so complacently offered. But Clarinda was getting her 'sacred feelings' mixed up with the truth. However, I suppose there is an essential truth about sacred feelings even when they're founded on an error. I surmised that you were holding back vastly more than you were saying. Now that we 're pretty well toward a mountain-top, with nobody listening, you might tell me what you were thinking."
Kate smiled slowly. She looked at the man beside her as if appraising him.
"I'm terribly afraid," she said at length, "that you are soul-kin to Clarinda. You'll walk in a mist of sacred feelings, too, and truth will play hide and seek with you all over the place."