“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 broom.  The disordered chairs themselves seemed affrighted, as if they had run, in all the senses of the word.  Death, the formidable, was there, hidden, waiting.

The story of the two sisters was very touching.  It was quoted far and wide; it had made many eyes to weep.

Suzanne, the elder, had once been madly in love with a young man, who had also been in love with her.  They were engaged, and were only waiting the day fixed for the contract, when Henry de Lampierre suddenly died.

The despair of the young girl was dreadful, and she vowed that she would never marry.  She kept her word.  She put on widow’s weeds, which she never took off.

Then her sister, her little sister Marguerite, who was only twelve years old, came one morning to throw herself into the arms of the elder, and said:  “Big Sister, I do not want thee to be unhappy.  I do not want thee to cry all thy life.  I will never leave thee, never, never!  I—­I, too, shall never marry.  I shall stay with thee always, always, always!”