"I don't know what she's crying about, Claire," Mrs. Bergemann at once proceeded to explain, with an aggrieved look toward her tearful daughter. "She don't want to go with me home to Germany; I s'pose that's it. And there's my own flesh and blood, Katrina Hoffmann, who's written me a letter, and begged me in it to come and pay her a visit before she dies. And because I want to go across in September--after you're married, Claire, of course--Sophia behaves like a baby." "Katrina Hoffmann!" now exclaimed Sophia, with plaintive contempt. "She's Ma's second-cousin, Claire. And what does Ma care about Germany? She was a child of ten when she left it. I don't want to go, and I won't go, and there's all about it!" But Sophia, for the first time in her life, had found a master in the mother who had so incessantly yielded to her least whim. The letter from Germany, as Claire soon discovered, was a mere pretext for flight. And Trask, of the yellow eyebrows, had caused this fugitive impulse in Mrs. Bergemann. She had learned about Trask; he was a clerk in an insurance company, on seven hundred a year. Sophia was the heiress of three millions. It would never do. All Mrs. Bergemann's rich fund of good nature shrank into arid disapproval of so one-sided a match. She developed a monstrous obstinacy. It was the old maternal instinct; she was protecting her young. They went to Germany in spite of all Sophia's lamentations. They went in the middle of September, and poor Trask was left to mourn his lost opportunities. Certain threats or entreaties, declaimed in private to Sophia by her affrighted parent, may have laid a veto upon the maiden's possible elopement. Or it may have been Trask's own timid fault that she did not fly with him. For she was very fond of Trask, and might have lent a thrilled ear to any ardent proposition from so beloved a source. But Trask had not a romantic soul; he accepted his fate with prosaic resignation. Moreover, his tendency to be obliging, to grant favors, to make himself of high value in an emergency, may have come forth in heroic brilliancy at the private request of Mrs. Bergemann herself. Wherever the real truth of the matter may have lain, Mrs. Bergemann and Sophia, as a plain fact, went to Europe in September, leaving the bereaved Trask behind them. But both, before their departure, were present at the marriage of Claire and Herbert Hollister. It was a very quiet wedding. It occurred on an exceedingly hot day. Sophia and her mother were to sail the day after. They both gave effusive good-byes to Claire as she left the Fifth Avenue mansion in her traveling-dress at Hollister's side. "I feel as if I should never, never see you again!" Sophia said, in a sort of pathetic gurgle, with both arms round Claire's neck.