He rose to his feet and began to walk about the room with steps in turn precipitate and slow.  Then he made an imperious gesture, sending every one away from him except the priest.

The next morning the duke, leaning on the arm of his old retainer Bertrand, walked along the shore and among the rocks looking for the son he had so long hated.  He saw him from afar in a recess of the granite rocks, lying carelessly extended in the sun, his head on a tuft of mossy grass, his feet gracefully drawn up beneath him.  So lying, Etienne was like a swallow at rest.  As soon as the tall old man appeared upon the beach, the sound of his steps mingling faintly with the voice of the waves, the young man turned his head, gave the cry of a startled bird, and disappeared as if into the rock itself, like a mouse darting so quickly into its hole that we doubt if we have even seen it.

“Hey! tete-Dieu! where has he hid himself?” cried the duke, reaching the rock beside which his son had been lying.

“He is there,” replied Bertrand, pointing to a narrow crevice, the edges of which had been polished smooth by the repeated assaults of the high tide.

“Etienne, my beloved son!” called the old man.

The hated child made no reply.  For hours the duke entreated, threatened, implored in turn, receiving no response.  Sometimes he was silent, with his ear at the cleft of the rock, where even his enfeebled hearing could detect the beating of Etienne’s heart, the quick pulsations of which echoed from the sonorous roof of his rocky hiding-place.

“At least he lives!” said the old man, in a heartrending voice.

Towards the middle of the day, the father, reduced to despair, had recourse to prayer:—­

“Etienne,” he said, “my dear Etienne, God has punished me for disowning you.  He has deprived me of your brother.  To-day you are my only child.  I love you more than I love myself.  I see the wrong I have done; I know that you have in your veins my blood with that of your mother, whose misery was my doing.  Come to me; I will try to make you forget my cruelty; I will cherish you for all that I have lost.  Etienne, you are the Duc de Nivron, and you will be, after me, the Duc d’Herouville, peer of France, knight of the Orders and of the Golden Fleece, captain of a hundred men-at-arms, grand-bailiff of Bessin, Governor of Normandy, lord of twenty-seven domains counting sixty-nine steeples, Marquis de Saint-Sever.  You shall take to wife the daughter of a prince.  Would you have me die of grief?  Come! come to me! or here I kneel until I see you.  Your old father prays you, he humbles himself before his child as before God himself.”

The hated son paid no heed to this language bristling with social ideas and vanities he did not comprehend; his soul remained under the impressions of unconquerable terror.  He was silent, suffering great agony.  Towards evening the old seigneur, after exhausting all formulas of language, all resources of entreaty, all repentant promises, was overcome by a sort of religious contrition.  He knelt down upon the sand and made a vow:—­