ilence still
more terrible. Then suddenly we all started. Some one was gliding along
the outside wall toward the forest; then he seemed to be feeling of the
door with a trembling hand; then for two minutes nothing was heard and
we almost lost our minds. Then he returned, still feeling along the
wall, and scratched lightly upon the door as a child might do with his
finger nails. Suddenly a face appeared behind the glass of the
peep-window, a white face with eyes shining like those of the cat
tribe. A sound was heard, an indistinct plaintive murmur.

"Then there was a formidable burst of noise in the kitchen. The old
gamekeeper had fired and the two sons at once rushed forward and
barricaded the window with the great table, reinforcing it with the
buffet.

"I swear to you that at the shock of the gun's discharge, which I did
not expect, such an anguish laid hold of my heart, my soul, and my very
body that I felt myself about to fall, about to die from fear.

"We remained there until dawn, unable to move, in short, seized by an
indescribable numbness of the brain.

"No one dared to remove the barricade until a thin ray of sunlight
appeared through a crack in the back room.

"At the base of the wall and under the window, we found the old dog
lying dead, his skull shattered by a ball.

"He had escaped from the little court by digging a hole under a fence."

The dark-visaged man became silent, then he added:

"And yet on that night I incurred no danger, but I should rather again
pass through all the hours in which I have confronted the most terrible
perils than the one minute when that gun was discharged at the bearded
head in the window."

_The Confession_

Marguerite de Therelles was dying. Although but fifty-six, she seemed
like seventy-five at least. She panted, paler than the sheets, shaken
by dreadful shiverings, her face convulsed, her eyes haggard, as if she
had seen some horrible thing.

Her eldest sister, Suzanne, six years older, sobbed on her knees beside
the bed. A little table drawn close to the couch of the dying woman,
and covered with a napkin, bore two lighted candles, the priest being
momentarily expected to give extreme unction and the communion, which
should be the last.

The apartment had that sinister aspect, that air of hopeless farewells,
which belongs to the chambers of the dying. Medicine bottles stood
about on the furniture, linen lay in the corners, pushed aside by foot
or br