"It only seems like a day since we came here," said Dorothy regretfully, "one long beautiful day. I do not feel as if I had ever been asleep."
"It is quite time then for you to be off," remarked the doctor; "you will be falling ill if you stay much longer. Take my word for it, you will enjoy the mountains as much as Venice when you get among them. There is nothing like the Dolomites."
But when the doctor was gone Dorothy entreated for one more sail in a gondola. The sun was set, and the heated air was fast growing cool. The moon was at the full, and as they floated toward the lagoons, the lights of the city behind them shone like jewels. The sound of music reached their ears, softened by distance, from gayly illuminated gondolas bearing bands of musicians up and down the Grand Canal. As soon as they were beyond this sound, and only the faintest ripple of the water against their gondola could be heard, Dorothy began to sing snatches of old north-country ballads and simple old-fashioned songs, in a soft undertone, with now and then a cadence of sadness in it, which seemed to chime in with the pale light of the moon, and the dim waters, and the dusky outlines of the city behind them. Margaret and Philip listened in silence, for they were afraid she would stop if they praised her.
"I feel so happy," she exclaimed, suddenly checking herself, as if she had forgotten she was not alone.
"So am I," said Philip, laughing, with such a boyish laugh as his mother had not heard for many months.
"And so am I," assented Margaret. "Oh! how good life is, even in this world!"
"But why are we so seldom happy?" asked Philip.
"Why are you happy now?" she rejoined.
"I will tell you why I am happy," said Dorothy, leaning toward them, as they sat opposite to her, and they saw her dark eyes shining in the moonlight. "I am thinking of nothing but this one moment, and everything is very good. The moon up there, and the little clouds in the sky, and these waves rippling round us, and the happy air; and you two whom I love and who love me. There is nothing here but what is good."
"Why should we not oftener live in the present moment," said Margaret, "instead of burdening it with the past and the future? God would have us do so, as children do who have a father to care for them. He gives us to-day; to-morrow he will give us another day, different, but as much his gift as this. If we would only take them as he sends them, one at a time, we should not be so seldom happy."