“Nay, nay.  The Saviour is already taking me by the hand.  Farewell, and again farewell.  Did you bring Paula?  I do not see her.  Did you bring Paula with you, sweetheart?  She—­did she leave us in anger?  If she only knew; ah! your Paula has treated us ill.”  The child’s heart was still full of the horrible crime which had so revolted her truthful nature, and which had deprived her of rest all through an evening, a long night and a morning; she laid her little head close to that of the old man—­her dearest and best friend.  For years he had filled her father’s place, and now he was dying, leaving her forever!  But she could not let him depart with a false idea of the woman whom she worshipped with all the fervor of her child’s heart; in a subdued voice, but with eager feeling, she said, close to his ear: 

“But Grandfather, there is one thing you must know before the Saviour takes you away to be happy in Heaven.  Paula told the truth, and never, never told a lie, not even for Hiram’s sake.  An empty gold frame hung to her necklace and no gem at all.  Whatever Orion may say, I saw it myself and cannot be mistaken, as truly as I hope to see you and my poor father in heaven!  And Katharina, too, thought better of it, and confessed to me just now that she had committed a great sin and had borne false witness before the judges to please her dear Orion.  I do not know what Hiram had done to offend him; but on the strength of Katharina’s evidence the judges condemned him to death.  But Paula—­you must understand that Paula had nothing, positively nothing whatever to do with the stealing of the emerald.”

Orion, kneeling there, was condemned to hear every word the little girl so vehemently whispered, and each one pierced his heart like a dagger-thrust.  Again and again he felt inclined to clutch at her across the bed and fling her on the ground before his father’s eyes; but grief and astonishment seemed to have paralyzed his whole being; he had not even the power to interrupt her with a single word.

She had spoken, and all was told.

He clung to the couch like a shattered wretch; and when his father turned his eyes on him and gasped out:  “Then the Court—­our Court of justice pronounced an unrighteous sentence?” he bowed his head in contrition.

The dying man murmured even less articulately and incoherently than before:  “The gem—­the hanging—­you, you perhaps—­was it you? that emerald—­I cannot. . .”

Orion helped his father in his vain efforts to utter the dreadful words.  Sooner would he have died with the old man than have deceived him in such a moment; he replied humbly and in a low voice: 

“Yes, Father—­I took it.  But as surely as I love you and my mother this, the first reckless act of my life, which has brought such horrors in its train. . .  Shall be the last,” he would have said; but the words “I took it,” had scarcely passed his lips when his father was shaken by a violent trembling, the expression of his eyes changed fearfully, and before the son had spoken his vow to the end the unhappy father was, by a tremendous effort, sitting upright.  Loud sobs of penitence broke from the young man’s heaving breast, as the Mukaukas wrathfully exclaimed, in thick accents, as quickly as the heavy, paralyzed tongue would allow: