ed?"

"It was committed while your father was watering his pony by the bank
of the stream. Cantegrel stole on him from behind, and struck him as
he was stooping over the saddle-bow."

"This is the truth, on your oath?"

"On my oath, it is the truth."

"You may leave us."

The priest rose from his chair without assistance. From the time when
the terror of death had forced him to reveal the murderer's name a
great change had passed over him. He had given his answers with the
immovable calmness of a man on whose mind all human interests had lost
their hold. He now left the room, strangely absorbed in himself;
moving with the mechanical regularity of a sleep-walker; lost to all
perception of things and persons about him. At the door he
stopped--woke, as it seemed, from the trance that possessed him--and
looked at the three brothers with a steady, changeless sorrow, which
they had never seen in him before, which they never afterward forgot.

"I forgive you," he said, quietly and solemnly. "Pray for me when my
time comes."

With those last words, he left them.

IV. THE END

The night was far advanced; but the three brothers determined to set
forth instantly for Toulouse, and to place their information in the
magistrate's hands before the morning dawned.

Thus far no suspicion had occurred to them of the terrible consequences
which were to follow their night-interview with the priest. They were
absolutely ignorant of the punishment to which a man in holy orders
exposed himself, if he revealed the secrets of the confessional. No
infliction of that punishment had been known in their neighborhood; for
at that time, as at this, the rarest of all priestly offenses was a
violation of the sacred trust confided to the confessor by the Roman
Church. Conscious that they had forced the priest into the commission
of a clerical offense, the brothers sincerely believed that the loss of
his curacy would be the heaviest penalty which the law could exact from
him. They entered Toulouse that night, discussing the atonement which
they might offer to Monsieur Chaubard, and the means which they might
best employ to make his future easy to him.

The first disclosure of the consequences which would certainly follow
the outrage they had committed, was revealed to them when they made
their deposition before the officer of justice. The magistrate
listened to their narrative with horror vividly expressed in his face
and manne