e!
It was but a moment back I was feeding my mind with the sad consolation
that my griefs were all my own,--that the gloom of my dreary fortune
cast no shadow on another; and now I see that I was wrong. _You_ must
pay the dear penalty of having befriended us!--the fruits of all your
hard years of industry!"

"And you would rob me of their best reward,--the glorious sense of
a generous action?" broke in Hans. "They _were_ years of toil and
privation, and they might have been years of pleasure if avarice and
greed had grown upon me; but I could not become a miser."

"The home you had made your own, lost to you forever!" sighed Nelly.

"It was no longer a home when you left it."

"The well-won provision for old age, Hanserl."

"And has not this event made me young again, and able to brave the
world, were it twice as adverse as ever I found it? Oh, Fraeulein, you
know not the heart-bounding ecstasy of him who, from the depths of an
humble station, can rise to do a service to those he looks up to! And
yet it is that thought which now warms my blood, and gives an energy to
my nature that, even in youth, I never felt."

Nelly was silent; and now neither spoke a word, but sat with bent-down
heads, deep sunk in their own reveries. At last she arose, and once more
the sad procession resumed its way. They toiled slowly along till they
reached the little level table-land, where the church stood,--a little
chapel, scarcely larger than a shrine, but long venerated as a holy
spot. Poor Dalton had often spent hours here, gazing on the wide expanse
of plain and mountain and forest that stretched away beneath; and it was
in one of his evening rambles that he had fixed upon the spot where they
should lay him, if he could not "rest his bones with his forefathers."

"Sixty-eight!" muttered the old priest, as he read the inscription on
the coffin-lid; "in the pride and vigor of manhood! Was he noble, that I
see these quarterings painted here?"

"Hush! that is his daughter," whispered Hanserl.

"If he were of noble blood, he should have lain in the chapel and on a
catafalque," muttered the priest.

"The family is noble, but poor," said Hans, in a low whisper.

"A low Mass, without the choir, would not ruin the poorest," said the
priest, who sprinkled the coffin with half impatience, and, mumbling a
few prayers, retired. And now the body was committed to the earth, and
the grave was filled. The last sod was patted down with the sho