Farmer Weitbreck and his son exchanged glances; each was too shocked to speak.  Mr. and Mrs. Dietman looked from one to the other in bewilderment.  “Maype you tink ve speak not truth,” Hans continued.  “Just let him come here, to our face, and you will see.”

“No!” said John, in a low, awe-stricken voice, “we do not think you are not speaking truth.”  He paused; glanced again at his father.  “We’d better take them up!” he said.

The old man nodded silently.  Even his hard and phlegmatic nature was shaken to the depths.

John led the way up the stairs, saying briefly, “Come.”  The Dietmans followed in bewilderment.

“There he is,” said John, pointing to the tall figure, rigid, under the close-drawn white folds; “we found him here only an hour ago, hung from the beam.”

A horror-stricken 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.