ntrigue--nay, such occupation
became more necessary, as an escape from himself.

And in the mean while, Olivier Dalibard sought to take courage from the
recollection that the Chouan had taken an oath (and he knew that oaths
are held sacred with the Bretons) that he would keep his hand from his
knife unless he had clear evidence of treachery; such evidence existed,
but only in Dalibard's desk or the archives of Fouche. Tush, he was
safe! And so, when from dreams of fear he started at the depth of night,
so his bolder wife would whisper to him with firm, uncaressing lips:
"Olivier Dalibard, thou fearest the living: dost thou never fear the
dead? Thy dreams are haunted with a spectre. Why takes it not the
accusing shape of thy mouldering kinsman?" and Dalibard would answer,
for he was a philosopher in his cowardice: "Il n'y a que les morts qui
ne reviennent pas."

It is the notable convenience of us narrators to represent, by what
is called "soliloquy," the thoughts, the interior of the personages we
describe. And this is almost the master-work of the tale-teller,--that
is, if the soliloquy be really in words, what self-commune is in the dim
and tangled recesses of the human heart! But to this privilege we are
rarely admitted in the case of Olivier Dalibard, for he rarely communed
with himself. A sort of mental calculation, it is true, eternally
went on within him, like the wheels of a destiny; but it had become a
mechanical operation, seldom disturbed by that consciousness of thought,
with its struggles of fear and doubt, conscience and crime, which
gives its appalling interest to the soliloquy of tragedy. Amidst the
tremendous secrecy of that profound intellect, as at the bottom of
a sea, only monstrous images of terror, things of prey, stirred in
cold-blooded and devouring life; but into these deeps Olivier himself
did not dive. He did not face his own soul; his outer life and his
inner life seemed separate individualities, just as, in some complicated
State, the social machine goes on through all its numberless cycles
of vice and dread, whatever the acts of the government, which is the
representative of the State, and stands for the State in the shallow
judgment of history.

Before this time Olivier Dalibard's manner to his son had greatly
changed from the indifference it betrayed in England,--it was kind and
affectionate, almost caressing; while, on the other hand, Gabriel, as if
in possession of some secret which