The sisters went up-stairs, and Owen followed them presently, and climbed to the cupola. Leaning on the window-sill there, he looked off over the country. The horizon was a ring of low blue hills, with a grand amethyst glittering to tell where the sea lay. Through the centre of this vast circle glimmered the river, silver, and gold, and steel-blue, and the white houses of the town lay like a heap of lilies scattered on its banks. Everywhere else was forest. Shadows of varying thought swept over the young man's face as he looked off, and drew freer breath from the distance. "Henceforth my shield must bear a martlet," he muttered. "But whither shall I fly?" That was the problem he was studying. He had come to this place only to see his family settled, and collect his own thoughts after their sudden fall from prosperity; then he would go out into the world, and work his own way. It was not pleasant, the change from that life of noble leisure and lofty work which he had planned, to one where compulsory labor for mere bread must occupy the greater part of his time; but it was inevitable. And as he looked abroad now, and breathed the fresh air that came frolicking out of the northwest, and remembered how wide the world is and how many veins in it are unwrought, his young courage rose, and the plans he had been building up for that year crumbled and ceased to excite his regret. Only a few months before their change of circumstances, his mother had been won to consent that he might visit Asia. He had meant to go north, south, east, and west, in that shabby, glorious old land, make himself for the nonce Tartar, Chinese, Indian, Persian, what not, and get a look at creation through the eyes of each. This young man's sympathies were by no means narrow. He had never been able to believe that God smiles with peculiar fondness on any particular continent, island, peninsula, or part of either, and is but a stepfather to the rest of the world. He was born with a hatred of barriers. He sympathized with Swift, who "hated all nations, professions, and communities, and gave all his love to individuals." Or, better than Swift, he had at least a theoretical love for mankind unfenced. He did not have to learn to love, that came naturally to him; he had to learn to hate. But he was a good hater. Take him all in all, Carl Owen Yorke was at twenty-one a noble, generous youth, of good mind and unstained reputation; and it was no proof of excessive vanity in him that he believed himself capable of taking any position he might strive for. "My dear Minerva tells me that I have in me some of the elements of failure," he said. "I wonder what they are?"