ave spoken to
you first about them."

"No; I cannot understand this letter at all," replied the girl. "I have
thought of it frequently these terrible days. I have wondered why it was
that if he had friends in the city, he did not speak to me of them. He
repeatedly told me that he had no friends there at all, that his life
should begin anew after we were married."

"And did he have any particular plans, in a business way, perhaps?"

"No; he had a comfortable little income and need have no fear for the
future. John was, of course, too young a man to settle down and do
nothing. But the only definite plans he had made were that we should
travel a little at first, and then he would look about him for a
congenial occupation. I always thought it likely he would resume a law
practice somewhere. I cannot understand in the slightest what the plans
are to which the letter referred."

"And do you think, from what you know of his state of mind when you saw
him last, that he would be likely so soon to be planning pleasures like
this?"

"No, no indeed! John was terribly crushed when my guardian insisted on
breaking off our engagement. Until my twenty-fourth birthday I am
still bound to do as my guardian says, you know. John's life and early
misfortune made him, as I have already said, morbidly sensitive and the
thought that it would be a bar to anything we might plan in the future,
had rendered him so depressed that--and it was not the least of my
anxieties and my troubles--that I feared... I feared anything might
happen."

"You feared he might take his own life, do you mean?"

"Yes, yes, that is what I feared. But is it not terrible to think that
he should have died this way--by the hand of a murderer?"

"H'm! And you cannot remember any possible friend he may have
found--some schoolboy friend of his youth, perhaps, with whom he had
again struck up an acquaintance."

"Oh, no, no, I am positive of that. John could not bear to hear the
names even of the people he had known before his misfortune. Still, I do
remember his once having spoken of a man, a German he had met in Chicago
and rather taken a fancy to, and who had also returned to Germany."

"Could this possibly have been the man to whom the letter is addressed?"

"No, no. This friend of John's was not married; I remember his
saying that. And he lived in Germany somewhere--let me think--yes, in
Frankfort-on-Main."

"And do you remember the man's name?"

"No, I can