"That was nice of you, Mr. Carnegie!"
"Only commonly decent, it seems to me. And, you see, I have told now."
"Told what?" asked Hope, approaching, with something very like a scowl on her bright face. "I do wish, Faith, that you'd look better after that Andy of yours! I happened to drop my best veil within his reach, and before I could stop him he had torn it to shreds. Texas doesn't act that way."
"You shall have mine," said Faith, promptly. "Poor Andy! I can't help liking him all the more, because everybody is down on him. My veil is just like yours, dear, so take it, and I'll go without. I don't care much for veils, anyhow, and we can be different in so little a thing as that, I'm sure."
Hope gave her an odd look.
"If that was the only thing we are different in!" she said instantly. "I'll never be so good as you, no matter how hard I try. And it's no matter about the veil at all! Do you know, it is exactly a month since we left home? It seems years when I think of Debby and the old school-days, yet the hours have seemed to fly sometimes, too."
"That's the odd thing about voyaging," observed the Traveler, as he joined them. "It sends our past out of our minds with its novelties, making it seem far away, yet there are few lagging hours, and Time never stands still."
"Is that always true?" asked Lady Moreham, turning quickly. "I have not found it so."
He looked at her with a kindly smile. It had become subtly understood among a few that this aristocratic lady had a past, and not a happy past.
"I think it as true as any general statement," he responded. "But I can also understand that insistent memories could never take such a strong hold of one as during the enforced leisure of long trips by land, or water. It would be a severe punishment for the remorseful, to condemn them to a voyage around the Horn in an old-fashioned sailing vessel. I think they would be ready for confession and hanging by the time they landed! But there's compensation in every situation, and the unhappy traveler, while remembering too much, perhaps, will also learn to readjust himself, and so make the future easier. Reflection is a good thing only when it lights up the future as well as the past."