Clara stammered out that there was a very witty article in the last _Atlantic_. “By the way,” the minister said to her pleasantly, “I must compliment you on a very touching story of yours I have read lately. It is ‘Silent Rooms.’ I confess to you, Miss Clara, that I wept over it.” How exquisite must be the sensibility of that person who weeps over one’s pathetic stories! Clara looked at the reverend doctor with a new interest. He certainly had a most beautiful nose, she observed, and his expression was benign. Moreover, he was a gentleman of good mind. “I am delighted by what you tell me, doctor,” she said. “For, while such emotion is the highest compliment I could receive, it does not hurt you. Indeed, I thought that sketch would be affecting. I shed tears myself when I was writing it, and I think that a pretty good cry-tear-ion to judge by. Beg pardon, papa! I didn’t mean to. It punned itself.” The minister then asked her to write a play and a hymn for the Christmas festival of his Sunday-school. “I should be delighted to, doctor,” she said, but clouded over a little. “I am not much in the way of that sort of composition, but I will try.” “Then you will succeed.” A bow and a smile accompanied the assertion. “Do not be too sure of that,” Clara exclaimed with vivacity. “I can write easily enough what is in my own mind, but not what is in other minds; and I haven’t an idea on this subject. I am not a facile writer when I have nothing to say. When I have no thoughts, I find it hard to express them.” “Oh! dash off some little thing,” said the doctor, with a sweep of the hand, as though he were sowing plays and poems broadcast. “Dash off some little thing!” repeated the young lady scornfully, when their visitor had left them. “‘_Dash off!_’ That is all he knows. I don’t believe he cried over my story!” “My daughter!” expostulated Mrs. Yorke; but her husband laughed. Melicent cast an indignant glance on her sister, and went out of the room. At that, Clara’s hilarity returned. Carl wrote to his mother often, giving her an account of his movements. He stayed nowhere long, and every letter concluded with an announcement of his intention to make a flying visit to some other place. The descriptions he gave and the adventures he related were not those of an ordinary sight-seer. “I should think that the boy were gathering material for a history of the nineteenth century,” his mother said, and was evidently very proud of him. But after a while she recollected he had not said that any one of these flying visits would be his last, and had never answered plainly her questions as to the time of his return. One day she suspected the truth. She had just received a letter from Carl, dated at Nice, in which he hinted at a projected trip to Asia Minor. After reading the letter through, she dropped it into her lap, and sat looking out through the window and off into distance.