"You did very well, my dear; but I suppose you know it was the most intimate thing you could have said to him, the greatest compliment you could pay him. If he ever does make any sort of a record, you have given him the right to come back to you with it." "He will never come back to me without it," said the girl. "But it was nothing--nothing! All idleness and nonsense, and the music after supper that went to his head." "I hope it was nothing more than"--Mrs. Valentin checked herself. There were things she said to her husband which sometimes threatened to slip out inadvertently when his youthful copy was near. "Well, I see nothing to be ashamed of, on your side. But such things are always a pity. They age a girl in spite of herself. And the boys--they simply forget. The rebuke does them good, but they forget to whom they owe it. It's just one of those things that make my girlie older. But oh, how fast life comes!" Elsie slipped her hand under her mother's cloak, and Mrs. Valentin pressed her own down hard upon it. "We must get aboard, dear. But I'm so glad you told me! And I didn't mean quite what I said about Billy's 'going off mad.' He has given all he had to give, poor boy; why he gave it is his own affair." "I hope--what I told you--has made no difference about his coming home. It's stupid of me to think it. But hard words come back, don't they, mother? Hard words--to an old friend!" "Billy is all right, dear; and it was so natural you should be tried with him! 'For to be wroth with one we'"--Mrs. Valentin had another of her narrow escapes. "Come, there is the porter waiting for us." "Mother," said Elsie sternly, "please don't misunderstand. I should never have spoken of this if I had been 'wroth' with him--in that way." "Of course not, dear; I understand. And it would never do, anyway, for father doesn't like the blood." "Father doesn't like the--what, mother?" Elsie asked the question half an hour later, as they sat in an adjoining section, waiting for their berths to be made up. "What, dear?" "What did you say father doesn't like--in the Castants?" "Oh, the blood, the family. This generation is all right--apparently. But blood will tell. You are too young to know all the old histories that fathers and mothers read young people by." "I think we are what we are," said Elsie; "we are not our great-grandfathers." "In a measure we are, and it should teach us charity. Not as much can be expected of Billy Castant, coming of the stock he does, as you might expect of that ancestry," and Mrs. Valentin nodded toward the formidable Eastern contingent. (Elsie was consciously hating them already.) "The fountain can rise no higher than its source." "I thought there was supposed to be a source a little higher than the ground--unless we are no more than earth-born fountains."