Herbert Thorne’s trial took place several weeks later. Every possible extenuating circumstance was brought to bear upon his sentence. Five years only was to be the term of his imprisonment, his punishment for the crime of a single moment of anger.
His wife waited for him in patient love. She did not go to Graz, but continued to live in the old mansion with the mansard roof. Her father was with her. The brother Theobald, the cause of all this suffering to those who had shielded him at the expense of their own happiness, had at last done the only good deed of his life—had put an end to his useless existence with his own hand.
Father and daughter waited patiently for the return of the man who had sinned and suffered for their sake. They spoke of him only in terms of the tenderest affection and respect.
And indeed, seldom has any condemned murderer met with the respect of the entire community as Herbert Thorne did. The tone of the newspapers, and public opinion, evinced by hundreds of letters from friends, acquaintances, and from strangers, was a great boon to the solitary man in his cell, and to the three loving hearts in the old house. And at the end of two years the clemency of the Monarch ended his term of imprisonment, and Herbert Thorne was set free, a step which met with the approval of the entire city.
He returned to the home where love and affection awaited him, ready to make him forget what he had suffered. But the silver threads in his dark hair and a certain quiet seriousness in his manner, and in the hearts of all the dwellers in the old mansion, showed that the occurrence of that fatal 27th of September had thrown a shadow over them all which was not to be shaken off.
Joseph Muller brought many other cases to a successful solution. But for years after this particular case had been won, he was followed, as by a shadow, by a man who watched over him, and who, whenever danger threatened, stood over the frail detective as if to take the blow upon himself. He is a clever assistant, too, and no one who had seen Johann Knoll the day that he was put into the cell on suspicion of murder would have believed that the idle tramp could become again such a useful member of society. These are the victories that Joseph Muller considers his greatest.