smilingly that she was going to ask a favor of me. Would I take her cab
on to the bank and get a check cashed for her? She did not want to go
there herself. And then she explained how her brother-in-law had given
her a check for a thousand thalers--was it not kind of him? It really
did not enter my head at the moment to think there was anything wrong
about the check. She had indorsed it, and I took it, received the money
for it, and brought it to her. She trembled so as she took it, and was
so remarkably quiet about it, that it suddenly flashed upon my mind that
there must be something not as it ought to be about it.

"I asked her a question or two, and she said, deliberately contradicting
herself, that the Herr Graf had not given it to her, but to her husband,
and then she went away, and I was sure I should hear more about it. I
did. She wrote to me in the course of a few days, saying she wished she
were dead, since Eugen, by his wickedness, had destroyed every chance of
happiness; she might as well be a widow. She sent me a package of
letters--my letters--and asked me to keep them, together with some other
things, an old desk among the rest. She had no means of destroying them
all, and she did not choose to carry them to Rothenfels, whither she was
going to be buried alive with those awful people.

"I accepted the charge. For five--no, six years, the desk, the papers,
everything lay with some other possessions of mine which I could not
carry about with me on the wandering life I led after my father's
death--stored in an old trunk in the lumber-room of a cousin's house. I
visited that house last week.

"Certain circumstances which have occurred of late years induced me to
look over those papers. I burned the old bundle of letters from myself
to her, and then I looked through the desk. In a pigeon-hole I found
these."

She handed some pieces of paper to Graf Bruno, who looked at them. I,
too, have seen them since. They bore the imitations of different
signatures; her husband's, Graf Bruno's, that of Anna Sartorius, and
others which I did not know.

The same conviction as that which had struck Anna flashed into the eyes
of Graf von Rothenfels.

"I found those," repeated Anna, "and I knew in a second who was the
culprit. He, your brother, is no criminal. She forged the signature of
the Herr Graf--"

"Who forged the signature of the Herr Graf?" asked a voice which caused
me to start up, which brought all our eyes f