isk
with each other, and lie happy by Katte's side; they had died calling
for their mother, and in the long, cold, cruel night, only death had
answered.

Findelkind did not weep, or scream, or tremble; his heart seemed frozen,
like the dead lambs.

It was he who had killed them.

He rose up and gathered them in his arms, and cuddled them in the skirts
of his sheepskin tunic, and cast his staff away that he might carry
them, and so, with their weight, set his face to the snow and the wind
once more, and began his downward way.

Once a great sob shook him; that was all. Now he had no fear.

The night might have been noonday, the snow-storm might have been
summer, for aught that he knew or cared.

Long and weary was the way, and often he stumbled and had to rest; often
the terrible sleep of the snow lay heavy on his eyelids, and he longed
to lie down and be at rest, as the little brothers were; often it seemed
to him that he would never reach home again. But he shook the lethargy
off him, and resisted the longing, and held on his way; he knew that his
mother would mourn for him as Katte mourned for the lambs. At length,
through all difficulty and danger, when his light had spent itself, and
his strength had well-nigh spent itself too, his feet touched the old
highroad. There were flickering torches and many people, and loud cries
around the church, as there had been four hundred years before, when the
last sacrament had been said in the valley for the hunter-king in peril
above.

His mother, being sleepless and anxious, had risen long before it was
dawn, and had gone to the children's chamber, and had found the bed of
Findelkind empty once more.

He came into the midst of the people with the two little lambs in his
arms, and he heeded neither the outcries of neighbours nor the frenzied
joy of his mother; his eyes looked straight before him, and his face was
white like the snow.

"I killed them," he said, and then two great tears rolled down his
cheeks and fell on the little cold bodies of the two little dead
brothers.

Findelkind was very ill for many nights and many days after that.

Whenever he spoke in his fever he always said, "I killed them!"

Never anything else.

So the dreary winter months went by, while the deep snow filled up lands
and meadows, and covered the great mountains from summit to base, and
all around Martinswand was quite still, and now and then the post went
by to Zirl, and on the ho