then knelt beside her and told her all.

"Outside the door stands the man who will take me back to Vienna--and
you, my dearest, you must go to your father." He concluded his story
with these words.

She bent down over him and kissed him. "'No, I am going with you," she
said softly, strangely calm; "why should I leave you now? Is it not I
who am the cause of this dreadful thing?"

And then she made her confession, much too late. And she went with him,
back to the city of their home. It seemed to them both quite natural
that she should do so.

When the Northern Express rolled out of Venice that afternoon, three
people sat together in a compartment, the curtains of which were drawn
close. They were the unhappy couple and their faithful servant. And
outside in the corridor of the railway carriage, a small, slight man
walked up and down--up and down. He had pressed a gold coin into the
conductor's hand, with the words: "The party in there do not wish to be
disturbed; the lady is ill."

Herbert Thorne's trial took place several weeks later. Every possible
extenuating circumstance was brought to bear upon his sentence. Five
years only was to be the term of his imprisonment, his punishment for
the crime of a single moment of anger.

His wife waited for him in patient love. She did not go to Graz, but
continued to live in the old mansion with the mansard roof. Her father
was with her. The brother Theobald, the cause of all this suffering to
those who had shielded him at the expense of their own happiness, had at
last done the only good deed of his life--had put an end to his useless
existence with his own hand.

Father and daughter waited patiently for the return of the man who had
sinned and suffered for their sake. They spoke of him only in terms of
the tenderest affection and respect.

And indeed, seldom has any condemned murderer met with the respect of
the entire community as Herbert Thorne did. The tone of the newspapers,
and public opinion, evinced by hundreds of letters from friends,
acquaintances, and from strangers, was a great boon to the solitary man
in his cell, and to the three loving hearts in the old house. And at
the end of two years the clemency of the Monarch ended his term of
imprisonment, and Herbert Thorne was set free, a step which met with the
approval of the entire city.

He returned to the home where love and affection awaited him, ready to
make him forget what he had suffered. But the silver