obert Shaler was the first to break the silence.

“There is but one request I have to make,” he said, as he knocked the ashes from his cigar.

“What is it, Robert? One request is very moderate indeed; isn’t that so, Emily?”

As she spoke Katrina’s friend turned to Mrs. Shaler with a smile.

“It is that you and mother will promise not to spend the whole time in the Elizabethan Gallery, but will allow me to see just one other room.” In the young man’s gray eyes was the suspicion of a twinkle, even in spite of the earnestness of his wish.

“And what room do you want to see, my son?”

“I want to see the one in which Martin Luther stayed.”

At this Katrina gave a little start. She recalled what her mother had told her only the night before about Martin Luther having been a prisoner at the Wartburg. How much she, too, would love to see that room!

“Yes, Robert, we must surely see it,” said Katrina’s friend. “No pilgrim to the Wartburg would ever be satisfied to go away without a visit to that room where the great Reformer accomplished some of his grandest work for mankind.” And as she spoke, the lady, under some sudden impulse, laid her white hand upon the little silver cross she wore.

“There is a question I have sometimes asked myself,” said Robert Shaler, “and have never been able to answer to my satisfaction; so I will put it to you and mother. Which of all the influences brought to bear on Luther’s life seems to you to have been the strongest? In other words, which did the most in directing him toward the path he chose?”

“I should say,” Mrs. Shaler answered, “that it was the fact of his being born of such good and honest parents as were Hans and Margaret Luther. No,” she added, after a moment of reflection, “it must have been when his dear friend Alexis, as they walked one day in the woods together, and were overtaken by a storm, was struck by a bolt of lightning and fell dead beside him. It was a bitter grief to Martin Luther, and the event is said by some to have changed the whole current of his life.”

“It seems to me,” said Katrina’s friend in her gentle, yet forceful way, and again her hand sought the little silver cross,—“it seems to me that it might be traced to the day when, in searching through the library of his university, Luther found a Bible, opened it, and, for the first time, read the Book of Samuel. In those days, my dear,” she said in explanation to Katrina, “even students were permitted to read only certain portions of the Scriptures. This story of how the boy Samuel had been taken to the Temple by his mother, and dedicated to the service of the Lord, impressed him very deeply. Then there took root within his own ardent nature a purpose that was steadfast—to know the way of life from God’s sacred Word itself. And was not this, after all, the message that he left us?”

Katrina had been listening with keen attention; she remembered what Fritz had told her about the Cotta house at Eisenach. As their talk of the previous evening all came back to her—how she had wondered if it had not been the Widow Cotta’s kindness that had helped to make Luther great, Katrina made up her mind to ask the question now. But even though her heart beat faster at the very thought of speaking, the little girl was about to do so when the lady took up the thread again and continued in her same sweet tone.

“To be sure, outside influences must affect one very deeply, but it seems to me that the true greatness of a soul must come from within that soul itself.”

As she spoke the lady looked down at Katrina, and saw the puzzled look in the childish face.

“Take this flower, for example,” and, saying this, she held up one of the fragrant crimson roses. “It is true beyond all question that the plant which bore this needed moisture, air, and sunshine, as well as the soil in which it grew—each at its very best,—but even back of all this does there not stand the fact that this exquisite flowering of the plant is the fulfilment of its own deep inner nature? Have you ever thought that it is through no outside influence that the rose becomes the rose, and the lily becomes the lily? Under such help a rose may be a better rose, or a lily a better lily; but each develops out of its own peculiar inner nature.”

Katrina tried hard to understand all that the lady said; and even though she could not then grasp it fully, she was later to come into a complete possession of its meaning. At that moment there was the sound of footsteps, and, looking down, Katrina saw her father coming toward them.

“Fritz could not come;” was Rudolf’s answer to her eager question.

“My friend,” he said, in explanation to the others, and with evident distress, “was found to have been more seriously injured than the doctors thought at first. He is suffering intensely, and Fritz will not leave his father’s bedside.”

“But you must come, anyway, Katrina,” said Mrs. Shaler, after they had all expressed their sympathy. “Another time you and Fritz can have your visit to the castle.”

“No,” Katrina said, “I told Fritz I would go with him, and I must keep my promise.” “You are right, my child,” said Katrina’s friend, stooping to kiss her brow, before she turned toward the entrance with the others. “A promise is a very sacred thing.”