unning which had
distorted his face while he had been speaking, faded from it forever.
He shivered a little, breathed heavily once or twice, then became quite
still.

Had he died with a falsehood on his lips?

Gabriel looked round and saw that the cottage door was closed, and
that his father was standing against it. How long he had occupied that
position, how many of the old man's last words he had heard, it was
impossible to conjecture, but there was a lowering suspicion in his
harsh face as he now looked away from the corpse to his son, which made
Gabriel shudder; and the first question that he asked, on once more
approaching the bedside, was expressed in tones which, quiet as they
were, had a fearful meaning in them.

"What did your grandfather talk about last night?" he asked.

Gabriel did not answer. All that he had heard, all that he had seen, all
the misery and horror that might yet be to come, had stunned his mind.
The unspeakable dangers of his present position were too tremendous to
be realized. He could only feel them vaguely in the weary torpor that
oppressed his heart; while in every other direction the use of his
faculties, physical and mental, seemed to have suddenly and totally
abandoned him.

"Is your tongue wounded, son Gabriel, as well as your arm?" his father
went on, with a bitter laugh. "I come back to you, saved by a miracle;
and you never speak to me. Would you rather I had died than the old man
there? He can't hear you now--why shouldn't you tell me what nonsense
he was talking last night? You won't? I say you shall!" (He crossed
the room and put his back to the door.) "Before either of us leave this
place, you shall confess it! You know that my duty to the Church bids
me to go at once and tell the priest of your grandfather's death. If I
leave that duty unfulfilled, remember it is through your fault! _You_
keep me here--for here I stop till I'm obeyed. Do you hear that, idiot?
Speak! Speak instantly, or you shall repeat it to the day of your death!
I ask again--what did your grandfather say to you when he was wandering
in his mind last night?"

"He spoke of a crime committed by another, and guiltily kept secret by
him," answered Gabriel, slowly and sternly. "And this morning he denied
his own words with his last living breath. But last night, if he spoke
the truth--"

"The truth!" echoed Francois. "What truth?"

He stopped, his eyes fell, then turned toward the corpse. For a few
minu