g a heavy crepe
veil, which concealed her face, entered our car, and slipped quietly
in to the vacant half of my seat. She sat quite motionless, with her
veil down. Every few moments a long, tremulous, heart-broken sigh
stirred this sable curtain which shut in my companion's face. I felt a
deep sympathy for her, whoever she might be, old or young, pretty or
ugly. I inferred that she was a widow; I could hear that she was in
affliction; but I was far too diffident to invent any little courteous
way of expressing my sympathy. In about half an hour, she put her veil
to one side, and asked me, in a low, sweet, pathetic voice, if I had
any objection to drawing down the blind, as her veil smothered her,
and she had wept so much that her eyes could not bear the strong light
of the afternoon sun. I drew down the blind--with such haste as to
pinch my fingers cruelly between the sash and the sill.

"Oh, I am _so_ sorry!" said she.

"It's of no consequence," I stammered, making a Toots of myself.

"Oh, but _it is_! and in my service too! Let me be your surgeon, sir,"
and she took from her traveling-bag a small bottle of cologne, with
which she drenched a delicate film of black-bordered handkerchief,
and then wound the same around my aching fingers. "You are pale," she
continued, slightly pressing my hand before releasing it--"ah, how
sorry I am!"

"I am pale because I have been ill recently," I responded, conscious
that all my becoming pallor was changing to turkey-red.

"Ill?--oh, how sad! What a world of trouble we live in! Ill?--and so
young--so hand----. Excuse me, I meant not to flatter you, but I have
seen so much sorrow myself. I am only twenty-two, and I've been a
wid--wid--wid--ow over a year."

She wiped away a tear with handkerchief No. 2, and smiled sadly in my
face.

"Sorrow has aged her," I thought, for, although the blind was down,
she looked to me nearer thirty than twenty-two.

Still, she was pretty, with dark eyes that looked into yours in a
wonderfully confiding way--melting, liquid, deep eyes, that even a man
who is perfectly self-possessed can not see to the bottom of soon
enough for his own good. As for me, those eyes confused while they
pleased me. The widow never noticed my embarrassment; but, the ice
once broken, talked on and on. She gave me, in soft, sweet, broken
accents, her history--how she had been her mother's only pet, and had
married a rich Chicago broker, who had died in less than two y