"Hans, Hans, the duke has sworn to hang you!"
Hans laughed. "The rope is not made that will fit my neck. Will you denounce me, brother?"
"I?" Hermann shrank back in horror.
"Why not? Five thousand crowns still hang over me."
"Blood-money for me? No, Hans!"
"Besides, I have made a will. At my death you will be rich."
"Rich?"
"Yes, Hermann. I am worth two hundred thousand crowns."
Hermann breathed with effort. So many things had beaten upon his brain in the past ten minutes that he was dazed. His brother Hans alive and here, and rich?
"But riches are not everything."
"Sometimes they are little enough," Hans agreed.
"Why did you do it?" Hermann's voice was full of agony.
"Have I not told you, Hermann? There is nothing more to be added." Then, with rising passion: "Nothing more, now that my heart is blistered and scarred with regret and remorse. God knows that I have repented and repented. I went to war because I wanted to be killed. They shot me here, and here, and here, and this saber-cut would have split the skull of any other man. But it was willed that I should come back here."
"My poor brother! You must fly from here at once!"
"From what?" tranquilly.
"The chancellor is suspicious."
"I know that. But since you, my brother, failed to identify me, certainly his excellency will not. I shall make no slip as in your case. And you will not betray me when I tell you that I have returned principally to find out whence came those thousand crowns."
"Ah! Find that out, Hans; yes, yes!" Hermann began to look more like himself. "But what was your part?"
"Mine? I was to tell where her highness and her nurse were to be at a certain hour of the day. Nothing more was necessary. My running away was the expression of my guilt; otherwise they would never have connected me with the abduction."
"Have you any suspicions?"
"None. And remember, you must not know me, Hermann, no matter where we meet. I am sleepy." Hans rose.
And this, thought Hermann, his bewilderment gaining life once more, and this calm, unruffled man, whose hair was whiter than his own, a veteran of the bloodiest civil war in history, this prosperous mechanic, was his little brother Hans!
"Hans, have you no other greeting?" Hermann asked, spreading out his arms.
The wanderer's face beamed; and the brothers embraced.
"You forgive me, then, Hermann?"
"Must I not, little Hans? You are all that is left me of the blood. True, I swore that if ever I saw you again I should curse you."