“Why did he return to Germany?”

“He was lonely and wanted to come home again.  He had made money in America—­John was very clever and highly educated—­but his heart longed for his own tongue and his own people.”

Muller took a folded piece of paper from his pocket.  “Do you know this handwriting?”

Miss Roemer read the few lines hastily and her voice trembled as she said:  “This is John’s handwriting.  I know it well.  This is the letter that was found on the table?”

“Yes, this letter appears to be the last he had written in life.  Do you know to whom it could have been written?  The envelope, as I suppose you know from the newspaper reports, was not addressed.  Do you know of any friends with whom he could have been on terms of sufficient intimacy to write such a letter?  Do you know what these plans for the future could have been?  It would certainly be natural that he should have spoken to you first about them.”

“No; I cannot understand this letter at all,” replied the girl.  “I have thought of it frequently these terrible days.  I have wondered why it was that if he had friends in the city, he did not speak to me of them.  He repeatedly told me that he had no friends there at all, that his life should begin anew after we were married.”

“And did he have any particular plans, in a business way, perhaps?”

“No; he had a comfortable little income and need have no fear for the future.  John was, of course, too young a man to settle down and do nothing.  But the only definite plans he had made were that we should travel a little at first, and then he would look about him for a congenial occupation.  I always thought it likely he would resume a law practice somewhere.  I cannot understand in the slightest what the plans are to which the letter referred.”

“And do you think, from what you know of his state of mind when you saw him last, that he would be likely so soon to be planning pleasures like this?”

“No, no indeed!  John was terribly crushed when my guardian insisted on breaking off our engagement.  Until my twenty-fourth birthday I am still bound to do as my guardian says, you know.  John’s life and early misfortune made him, as I have already said, morbidly sensitive and the thought that it would be a bar to anything we might plan in the future, had rendered him so depressed that—­and it was not the least of my anxieties and my troubles—­that I feared ...  I feared anything might happen.”

“You feared he might take his own life, do you mean?”

“Yes, yes, that is what I feared.  But is it not terrible to think that he should have died this way—­by the hand of a murderer?”

“H’m!  And you cannot remember any possible friend he may have found—­some schoolboy friend of his youth, perhaps, with whom he had again struck up an acquaintance.”

“Oh, no, no, I am positive of that.  John could not bear to hear the names even of the people he had known before his misfortune.  Still, I do remember his once having spoken of a man, a German he had met in Chicago and rather taken a fancy to, and who had also returned to Germany.”