periods when they now met,
except when absolutely obliged to speak, he preserved total silence in
his intercourse with Gabriel. He would never take Gabriel out with him
in the boat; he would never sit alone with Gabriel in the house; he
would never eat a meal with Gabriel; he would never let the other
children talk to him about Gabriel; and he would never hear a word in
expostulation, a word in reference to anything his dead father had said
or done on the night of the storm, from Gabriel himself.

The young man pined and changed, so that even Perrine hardly knew him
again, under this cruel system of domestic excommunication; under the
wearing influence of the one unchanging doubt which never left him; and,
more than all, under the incessant reproaches of his own conscience,
aroused by the sense that he was evading a responsibility which it was
his solemn, his immediate duty to undertake. But no sting of conscience,
no ill treatment at home, and no self-reproaches for failing in his
duty of confession as a good Catholic, were powerful enough in their
influence over Gabriel to make him disclose the secret, under the
oppression of which his very life was wasting away. He knew that if he
once revealed it, whether his father was ultimately proved to be guilty
or innocent, there would remain a slur and a suspicion on the family,
and on Perrine besides, from her approaching connection with it, which
in their time and in their generation could never be removed. The
reproach of the world is terrible even in the crowded city, where many
of the dwellers in our abiding-place are strangers to us--but it is far
more terrible in the country, where none near us are strangers, where
all talk of us and know of us, where nothing intervenes between us and
the tyranny of the evil tongue. Gabriel had not courage to face this,
and dare the fearful chance of life-long ignominy--no, not even to serve
the sacred interests of justice, of atonement, and of truth.

CHAPTER IV.

While Gabriel still remained prostrated under the affliction that was
wasting his energies of body and mind, Brittany was visited by a great
public calamity, in which all private misfortunes were overwhelmed for a
while.

It was now the time when the ever-gathering storm of the French
Revolution had risen to its hurricane climax. Those chiefs of the new
republic were in power whose last, worst madness it was to decree the
extinction of religion and the overthrow of e