silence fell on the group.

Hans spoke first. "He know dat we know; so he kill himself to save dat
de hangman have trouble."

John resented the flippant tone. He understood now the whole mystery of
Wilhelm's life in this house.

"He has never known a happy minute since he was here," he said. "He
never smiled; nor spoke, if he could help it. Only last night, after he
came back from your place, he laughed and sang, and was merry, and
looked like another man; and he bade us all good-night over and over,
and shook hands with every one. He had made up his mind, you see, that
the end had come, and it was nothing but a relief to him. He was glad to
die. He had not courage before. But now he knew he would be arrested he
had courage to kill himself. Poor fellow, I pity him!" And John smoothed
out the white folds over the clasped hands on the quiet-stricken breast,
resting at last. "He has been worse punished than if he had been hung in
the beginning," he said, and turned from the bed, facing the Dietmans as
if he constituted himself the dead man's protector.

"I think no one but ourselves need know," he continued, thinking in his
heart of Carlen. "It is enough that he is dead. There is no good to be
gained for any one, that I see, by telling what he had done."

"No," said Mrs. Dietman, tearfully; but her husband exclaimed, in a
vindictive tone:

"I see not why it is to be covered in secret. He is murderer. It is to
be sent vord to Mayence he vas found."

"Yes, they ought to know there," said John, slowly; "but there is no
need for it to be known here. He has injured no one here."

"No," exclaimed Farmer Weitbreck. "He haf harm nobody here; he vas goot.
I haf ask him to stay and haf home in my house."

It was a strange story. Early in the spring, it seemed, about six weeks
before Hans Dietman and his wife Gretchen were married, a shepherd on
the farm adjoining Gretchen's father's had been murdered by a
fellow-laborer on the same farm. They had had high words about a dog,
and had come to blows, but were parted by some of the other hands, and
had separated and gone their ways to their work with their respective
flocks.

This was in the morning. At night neither they nor their flocks
returned; and, search being made, the dead body of the younger shepherd
was found lying at the foot of a precipice, mutilated and wounded, far
more than it would have been by any accidental fall. The other
shepherd, Carl Lepmann, had disapp