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 holy-days the bells
tolled; that was all. His mother sat between the stove and his
bed with a sore heart; and his father, as he went to and fro
between the walls of beaten snow from the wood-shed to the
cattle-byre, was sorrowful, thinking to himself the child would
die, and join that earlier Findelkind whose home was with the
saints.