“I would rather depend upon your silence than your assurances.  Still, you shall have your chance.  I am a fool, perhaps, but I have a reluctance to shed blood.  Go into the house, Fresnel.  Go, man.  I follow you.”

In the shabby main room of that dwelling, Andre-Louis halted him again.  “Get me a length of rope,” he commanded, and was readily obeyed.

Five minutes later Fresnel was securely bound to a chair, and effectively silenced by a very uncomfortable gag improvised out of a block of wood and a muffler.

On the threshold the departing Andre-Louis turned.

“Good-night, Fresnel,” he said.  Fierce eyes glared mute hatred at him.  “It is unlikely that your ferry will be required again to-night.  But some one is sure to come to your relief quite early in the morning.  Until then bear your discomfort with what fortitude you can, remembering that you have brought it entirely upon yourself by your uncharitableness.  If you spend the night considering that, the lesson should not be lost upon you.  By morning you may even have grown so charitable as not to know who it was that tied you up.  Good-night.”

He stepped out and closed the door.

To unlock the ferry, and pull himself across the swift-running waters, on which the faint moonlight was making a silver ripple, were matters that engaged not more than six or seven minutes.  He drove the nose of the boat through the decaying sedges that fringed the southern bank of the stream, sprang ashore, and made the little craft secure.  Then, missing the footpath in the dark, he struck out across a sodden meadow in quest of the road.

BOOK II: 

CHAPTER I

THE TRESPASSERS

Coming presently upon the Redon road, Andre-Louis, obeying instinct rather than reason, turned his face to the south, and plodded wearily and mechanically forward.  He had no clear idea of whither he was going, or of whither he should go.  All that imported at the moment was to put as great a distance as possible between Gavrillac and himself.

He had a vague, half-formed notion of returning to Nantes; and there, by employing the newly found weapon of his oratory, excite the people into sheltering him as the first victim of the persecution he had foreseen, and against which he had sworn them to take up arms.  But the idea was one which he entertained merely as an indefinite possibility upon which he felt no real impulse to act.

Meanwhile he chuckled at the thought of Fresnel as he had last seen him, with his muffled face and glaring eyeballs.  “For one who was anything but a man of action,” he writes, “I felt that I had acquitted myself none so badly.”  It is a phrase that recurs at intervals in his sketchy “Confessions.”  Constantly is he reminding you that he is a man of mental and not physical activities, and apologizing when dire necessity drives him into acts of violence.  I suspect this insistence upon his philosophic detachment — for which I confess he had justification enough — to betray his besetting vanity.