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.”