A steamship, ghostly white in the cool September moonlight, was making its way silently across the Caribbean.
A man and a woman were standing very close together, leaning on the rail of the passenger deck. She had brought him out to show him the Southern Cross tilting in the sky ahead of them. But now the woman, a gloriously beautiful girl of twenty-four or five, changed the subject.
"There must be some very special Fate looking after me," she said gravely. "I have thought so many times since that day in the courtroom. Why has Fate been so good to me? I have been selfish, thoughtless, anything almost that a good woman should not be, and yet I have attained every one of my heart's desires. I have you and my father back again, and, though it doesn't seem at all important now, I have the money I once thought I could never do without."
He looked down at her, smiling.
"There is one very marvelous thing about most women, Carmelita," he said. "As soon
