“Are men any worse than they were in the old time?” asked Leonhard, evidently not entering into the conversation with the keenest enjoyment.

“I do not know how it is,” said Loretz with a sigh, continuing to turn the leaves of the book as he spoke.

“Perhaps we have less imagination, and don’t look at every new-comer as a friend until we have tried him,” suggested Leonhard.  “We decide that everybody shall be tested before we accept him.  And isn’t it the best way?  Better than to be disappointed, when we have set our heart on a man—­or a woman.”

“I do not know—­I cannot account for it,” said Mr. Loretz.  Then with a sudden start he laid his right hand on the page before him, and with a great pleased smile in his deep-set, small blue eyes he said:  “Here is your name.  I felt sure I should find it:  I felt certain it was down.  See here, on my grandfather’s page—­Leonhard Marten, Herrnhut, 1770.  How do you like that?”

“I like it well,” said Leonhard, bending over the book and examining the close-fisted autograph set down strongly in unfading ink.  Had he found an ancestor at last?  What could have amazed him as much?

“What have you found?” asked Mrs. Loretz, who had heard these remarks in the next room, where she was actively making preparations for the breakfast, which already sent forth its odorous invitations.

“We have found the name,” answered her husband.  “Come and see.  I have read it, I dare say, a hundred times:  that was what made me feel that an old friend had come.”

“That means,” said the good woman, hastening in at her husband’s call, and reading the name with a pleased smile—­“that means that you belong to us.  I thought you did.  I am glad.”

Were these folk so intent on securing a convert that in these various ways they made the young stranger feel that he was not among strangers in this unknown Spenersberg?  Nothing was farther from their thought:  they only gave to their kindly feeling hearty utterance, and perhaps spoke with a little extra emphasis because the constraint they secretly felt in consequence of their household trouble made them unanimous in the effort to put it out of sight—­not out of this stranger’s sight, but out of their own.

“Perhaps you will stop with us a while, and maybe write your name on my page before you go,” said Loretz, afraid that his wife had gone a little too far.

“Without a single test?” Leonhard answered.  “Haven’t we just agreed that we wise men don’t take each other on trust, as they did in our grandfathers’ day?”

“A man living in Herrnhut in 1770 would not have for a descendant a—­a man I could not trust,” said Loretz, closing the book and placing it in its chamois covering again.  “Breakfast, mother, did you say?”

“Have you wanted ink?” asked Sister Benigna, entering at that instant.  “Are we writing in the sacred birthday book?”

“Not yet,” said Leonhard hastily, the color rising to his face in a way to suggest forked lightning somewhere beyond sight.