What had happened?  What could have happened?  Now, for the first time, Carlen saw the full beauty of his face; it wore an exultant look as of one set free, triumphant.  He leaped lightly over the bars; he stooped and fondled the dog, speaking to him in a merry tone; then he whistled, then broke again into singing a gay German song.  Carlen was stupefied with wonder.  Who was this new man in the body of Wilhelm?  Where had disappeared the man of slow-moving figure, bent head, downcast eyes, gloom-stricken face, whom until that hour she had known?  Carlen clasped her hands in an agony of bewilderment.

“If he has found his sweetheart, I shall die,” she thought.  “How could it be?  A letter, perhaps?  A message?” She dreaded to see him.  She lingered in her room till it was past the supper hour, dreading what she knew not, yet knew.  When she went down the four were seated at supper.  As she opened the door roars of laughter greeted her, and the first sight she saw was Wilhelm’s face, full of vivacity, excitement.  He was telling a jesting story, at which even her mother was heartily laughing.  Her father had laughed till the tears were rolling down his cheeks.  John was holding his sides.  Wilhelm was a mimic, it appeared; he was imitating the ridiculous speech, gait, gestures, of a man he had seen in the village that afternoon.

“I sent you to village sooner as dis, if I haf known vat you are like ven you come back,” said Farmer Weitbreck, wiping his eyes.

And John echoed his father.  “Upon my word, Wilhelm, you are a good actor.  Why have you kept your light under a bushel so long?” And John looked at him with a new interest and liking.  If this were the true Wilhelm, he might welcome him indeed as a brother.

Carlen alone looked grave, anxious, unhappy.  She could not laugh.  Tale after tale, jest after jest, fell from Wilhelm’s lips.  Such a story-teller never before sat at the Weitbreck board.  The old kitchen never echoed with such laughter.

Finally John exclaimed:  “Man alive, where have you kept yourself all this time?  Have you been ill till now, that you hid your tongue?  What has cured you in a day?”

Wilhelm laughed a laugh so ringing, it made him seem like a boy.

“Yes, I have been ill till to-day,” he said; “and now I am well.”  And he rattled on again, with his merry talk.

Carlen grew cold with fear; surely this meant but one thing.  Nothing else, nothing less, could have thus in an hour rolled away the burden of his sadness.

Later in the evening she said timidly, “Did you hear any news in the village this afternoon, Wilhelm?”

“No; no news,” he said.  “I had heard no news.”

As he said this a strange look flitted swiftly across his face, and was gone before any eye but a loving woman’s had noted it.  It did not escape Carlen’s, and she fell into a reverie of wondering what possible double meaning could have underlain his words.