he found himself still seated at the table, the
brown parchment still spread out before him, and the faint light of
early morning breaking into the room. The window was wide open, as he
had left it, and he was chilled to the marrow; he had a shocking cold
in the head; there were rheumatic twinges in all his joints as he arose.
What with the physical misery arising from these causes, and the moral
misery arising from his sense of committed sin, he was in about as
desperately bad a humor with himself as a man could be. He was in no
mood to make another effort to read the difficult German of the recipe,
the cause of all his troubles. The sight of it pained him, and he thrust
it hurriedly into an old desk in which were stored (and these also
were a source of pain to him) several generations of uncollected
bills--practical proofs that the adage in regard to the impossibility of
simultaneously possessing cakes and pennies does not always hold good.

He locked the desk and put the key in his pocket; and then returned the
key to the lock and left it there, as the thought occurred to him that
the locking of this desk, that never in all the years that he had
owned it had been locked before, might arouse suspicion. It seemed most
natural to Gottlieb that his actions should be regarded with suspicion;
he had a feeling that already his crime must be known to half the world.

And before night it certainly is true that the one person most deeply
interested in the discovery and punishment of Gottlieb's crime--that
is to say, Hans Kuhn--did know all about it; which fact would seem
surprising, considering how skilfully Gottlieb had gone about his work,
were it not remembered that his unwitting accessory had been the
little round Brunswicker widow, and were it not known that little round
widows--Brunswick born or born elsewhere--as a class are incapable of
keeping a secret.

This excellent woman, to do her justice, had followed Gottlieb's orders
to the letter. He had warned her not to tell the loose apprentice
that his chest had been searched; and, so far as that apprentice was
concerned, wild horses might have been employed to drag that little
round widow to pieces--at least she might have permitted the wild horses
to be hitched up to her--before ever an indiscreet word would have
passed her lips. But when Hans Kuhn, for whom she entertained a high
respect, and for whom she had also that warmly friendly feeling which
trig middle-aged