“You too?” she laughed.

“And what would you say, Worthie,” she asked after they had gone a little way in silence, “was the difference between thinking and wondering?”

Worth maturely crossed his knees as a sign of the maturity of the subject.  “Well, I don’t know, ’cept when you think you know what you’re thinking about, and when you wonder you just don’t know anything.”

“Maybe you wonder when you don’t know what to think,” Katie suggested.

“Yes, maybe so.  There’s more to wonder about than there is to think about, don’t you think so, Aunt Kate?”

“I wonder,” she laughed.

“You do wonder, don’t you, Aunt Kate?  You wonder more than you think.”

She flashed him a keen, queer look.

“Worth,” she asked, after another pause in which the mind of twenty-five and the mind of six were wondering in their respective fashions, “do you know anything about the underlying principles of life?”

“The what, Aunt Kate?”

“Underlying principles of life,” she repeated grimly.

“Why no,” he acknowledged, “I guess I never heard of them.”

“I never did either, till just lately.  I want to find out something about them.  Do you know, Worthie dear, I’d go a long way to find out something about them.”

“Where would you have to go, Aunt Kate?  Could you go in a boat?”

“No, I fear you couldn’t go in a boat.  Trouble is,” she murmured, more to herself than to him, “I don’t know where you would go.”

“Don’t Papa know ’bout them?”

“I sometimes think he would like to learn.”

“Papa knows all there is to know ’bout guns and powders,” defended Worth loyally.

“Yes, I know; but I don’t believe guns and powders have any power to get you to these underlying principles of life.”

“Well, what does get you there?” demanded her companion of the practical sex.

She laughed.  “I don’t know, dear.  I honestly don’t know.  And I’d like to know.  Perhaps some time I will meet some one who is very wise, and then I’ll ask whether it is experience, or wisdom, or sympathy.  Whether some people are born to get there and other people not, or just how it is.”

“Watts says you have more sympathy than wisdom, Aunt Kate.”

“You mustn’t talk about me to Watts,” she admonished spiritedly.  Then in the distance she heard a mocking voice insinuatingly inquiring:  “But why not, if it’s all one world?”

“But he said,” Worth added, “that it shouldn’t be held against you, ’cause of course you never had half a chance.  No, it wasn’t Watts said that, either.  It was the man that mends the boats.  It was Watts said you was a yard wide.”

Katie’s head had gone up; she was looking straight ahead, cheeks red.  “Indeed!  So it’s the man that mends the boats says these hateful things about me, is it?”

“Why no, Aunt Kate; not hateful things.  He says he’s sorry for you.  Why, he says he don’t know anybody more to be pitied than you are.”