TWO months passed before Millerstown settled down, from the excited speculation which followed Katy Gaumer's flash of memory and its remarkable effects, into its usual level of excitement. Millerstown was usually excited over something. By the end of two months Sarah Ann and Bevy and Susannah Kuhns had ceased to gather on one another's porches or in one another's houses to discuss the strange Hartmans. By the end of three months all possible explanations had been offered, all possible questions answered, or proved unanswerable. Had Cassie known of the hiding-place of the silver service? Had Cassie died of a broken heart? Did persons ever die of broken hearts? Why, and again why, why, why, did John Hartman push the silver service into the hole? And why, having pushed it in, did John Hartman not take it out? Why had not Katy remembered the strange incident long before this? "My belief is it _was_ to be so," said Susannah Kuhns, a vague conclusion which Millerstown applied to all inexplicable affairs. In all their speculations, no one ever thought of John Hartman or alluded to John Hartman as a thief. For once, Millerstown accepted the incomprehensible. Of the sad causes of John Hartman's behavior Millerstown knew nothing, could never know anything. Sarah Ann, being more tender-hearted than the rest, and seeing a little more deeply into the lives of her fellow men and women, thought longest about the Hartmans. Sarah Ann's husband had been a disagreeable and parsimonious man and Sarah Ann knew something of the misery of a divided hearthstone. She often laid down the Millerstown "Star," fascinating as it was with its new stories, of a man driven by house cleaning to suicide in a deep well, of a dog which spoke seven words, or of a snake creeping up a church aisle, and took off her spectacles and thought of the Hartmans and of the Koehlers and of Katy Gaumer's strange part in their affairs. Millerstown was not entirely deprived of subject-matter by its exhaustion of the Hartman mystery. David Hartman had employed a housekeeper and had opened his great mansion from top to bottom. All Millerstown walked past during the first few days of his occupancy to see whether it was true that there were lights in the parlor and that the squire and the preacher went in and out the front door to visit David. David had been carefully inspecting his orchards and farms, had visited again the land on the mountain-side with its double treasure. David had brought his riding-horse to Millerstown and Millerstown flew once more to doors and windows to see him pass. David consulted with his farmers; David asked a thousand questions of the squire; David was busy from morning till night. "And David is nice and common," boasted Bevy Schnepp, who behaved as though she were David's mother and grandmother and maiden aunt in one. "He is never proud; you would never know he was so rich and educated."