Gradually a second change came over John Hartman. His horror of discovery became a horror of his sin; he was bowed with grief and remorse. "He has gone crazy over it!" he lamented. "William Koehler has gone crazy over it. I wish"--poor Hartman spoke with agony--"I wish he had proved it against me. Then it would all have been over long ago!" When William Koehler's wife died, John Hartman struggled terribly with himself, but could not bring himself to make confession. From an upper window he watched the little cortège leave the house on the hill; he saw William lift his little boy into the carriage; he saw the cortège disappear in the whirling snow. But still he was silent. When William in his insanity mortgaged his little house in order to pay dishonest and thieving men to watch John Hartman, John Hartman secured the mortgage and treasured it against the time when he would prove to William that he had tried to do well by him. John Hartman also bought other mortgages. When Oliver Kuhns, the elder, squandered his little inheritance in the only spree of his life, John Hartman helped him to keep the whole matter from Millerstown and restored to him his house. When one of the Fackenthals, yielding to a mad impulse to speculate, used the money of the school board and lost it, John Hartman gave him the money in secret. Proud Emma Loos never knew that her husband had wasted her little patrimony before he died. Sarah Benner never discovered that for days threat of prison hung over her son and that John Hartman helped him to make good what he had stolen. But John Hartman's benefactions did not ease his soul. He came to see clearly that he must have peace of mind or he would die. He no longer thought of the disgrace to his wife and son; his thoughts had been for so long fixed upon himself that he could put himself in the place of no one else. "To-morrow I will make this right," he would say, and forever, "To-morrow, to-morrow!" But the years passed and William Koehler grew more mad and John Hartman more rich and more silent, and the silver service lay deep in the pit between the church and the Sunday School. The little building was solid, it was amply large, it would serve many generations. Katy Gaumer, brushed out of his path by John Hartman as he sought the door that November day, recalled nothing of the incident except that her childish dignity had been wounded. It was Katy herself who said that nothing ever happened in Millerstown!