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. "Did you know Mr. Dietman in Germany?" she asked. This was the name of the farmer to whose house he had been sent on an errand. They were new-comers into the town, since spring. "No!" replied Wilhelm, with another strange, sharp glance at Carlen. "I saw him not before." "Have they children?" she continued. "Are they old?" "No; young," he answered. "They haf one child, little baby." Carlen could not contrive any other questions to ask. "It must have been a letter," she thought; and her face grew sadder.