“No; he had a comfortable little income and need have no fear for the future. John was, of course, too young a man to settle down and do nothing. But the only definite plans he had made were that we should travel a little at first, and then he would look about him for a congenial occupation. I always thought it likely he would resume a law practice somewhere. I cannot understand in the slightest what the plans are to which the letter referred.”
“And do you think, from what you know of his state of mind when you saw him last, that he would be likely so soon to be planning pleasures like this?”
“No, no indeed! John was terribly crushed when my guardian insisted on breaking off our engagement. Until my twenty-fourth birthday I am still bound to do as my guardian says, you know. John’s life and early misfortune made him, as I have already said, morbidly sensitive and the thought that it would be a bar to anything we might plan in the future, had rendered him so depressed that—and it was not the least of my anxieties and my troubles—that I feared... I feared anything might happen.”
“You feared he might take his own life, do you mean?”
“Yes, yes, that is what I feared. But is it not terrible to think that he should have died this way—by the hand of a murderer?”
“H’m! And you cannot remember any possible friend he may have found—some schoolboy friend of his youth, perhaps, with whom he had again struck up an acquaintance.”
“Oh, no, no, I am positive of that. John could not bear to hear the names even of the people he had known before his misfortune. Still, I do remember his once having spoken of a man, a German he had met in Chicago and rather taken a fancy to, and who had also returned to Germany.”
“Could this possibly have been the man to whom the letter is addressed?”
“No, no. This friend of John’s was not married; I remember his saying that. And he lived in Germany somewhere—let me think—yes, in Frankfort-on-Main.”
“And do you remember the man’s name?”