e inquired.

Esther nodded. "Yes, I did not feel like being polite to any one this
afternoon. Betty told me to ask you to walk over and join them if you
are not too tired."

"I am not too tired, yet I have not the remotest idea of going," Dick
returned quietly. "Though I declare to you, Esther, that it seems to me
if Betty really does care for this German fellow, it will be about the
last straw."

Always if you had asked Esther Crippen's friends what they considered
the dominant trait of her character the answer would have been
"sympathy." So now, observing Richard Ashton's anxiety and depression,
she almost entirely forgot her own.

"The last straw, Dr. Ashton?" she repeated. And then smiling and yet
wholly gentle she asked, "Why do you say 'the last straw' in such a
desperate fashion? Surely things are not going so wrong with you! If you
feel so dreadfully unhappy over leaving Betty and your mother behind,
why you know I don't wish to be selfish. Take them with you; I shall
manage somehow."

Leaning over, Dick Ashton touched Esther's hand lightly with his lips in
such a friendly, kindly fashion that the girl did not flush or draw it
away.

"Who says that I am so desperate over leaving mother and the Princess to
take care of our future great American prima donna?" he asked
half-joking and half-serious.

The girl's brows drew together in her effort to understand and
appreciate her friend's real meaning. "Why, I don't see what else there
can be to make you unhappy," she replied thoughtfully. "You are going
back to your own country, which you know you have learned to care more
for with each year that you have spent away from it. And you are going
to commence the practice of the profession you have always loved since
you were a child. But of course if there is anything else that is
worrying you which I have not the right to know, I don't want you to
think that I am trying to make you confide in me. I can sympathize with
you without understanding."

"Then you have a very rare and wonderful gift, Esther," Dick Ashton
replied. "But please read your letters and don't consider me."

Slowly the girl read a letter from her father, which besides its
interest in her work was so full of bits of Woodford interest and gossip
that she felt herself growing sharply homesick. Then, tucking this
letter inside her dress, to re-read to her sister later, Esther slowly
opened the one from her music master in Berlin. It was just wha