“I took an oath not to tell it, Gabriel—­lean down closer!  I’m weak, and they mustn’t hear a word in that room—­I took an oath not to tell it; but death is a warrant to all men for breaking such an oath as that.  Listen; don’t lose a word I’m saying!  Don’t look away into the room:  the stain of blood-guilt has defiled it forever!  Hush! hush! hush!  Let me speak.  Now your father’s dead, I can’t carry the horrid secret with me into the grave.  Just remember, Gabriel—­try if you can’t remember the time before I was bedridden, ten years ago and more—­it was about six weeks, you know, before your mother’s death; you can remember it by that.  You and all the children were in that room with your mother; you were asleep, I think; it was night, not very late—­only nine o’clock.  Your father and I were standing at the door, looking out at the heath in the moonlight.  He was so poor at that time, he had been obliged to sell his own boat, and none of the neighbors would take him out fishing with them—­your father wasn’t liked by any of the neighbors.  Well; we saw a stranger coming toward us; a very young man, with a knapsack on his back.  He looked like a gentleman, though he was but poorly dressed.  He came up, and told us he was dead tired, and didn’t think he could reach the town that night and asked if we would give him shelter till morning.  And your father said yes, if he would make no noise, because the wife was ill, and the children were asleep.  So he said all he wanted was to go to sleep himself before the fire.  We had nothing to give him but black bread.  He had better food with him than that, and undid his knapsack to get at it, and—­and—­Gabriel!  I’m sinking—­drink! something to drink—­I’m parched with thirst.”

Silent and deadly pale, Gabriel poured some of the cider from the pitcher on the table into a drinking-cup, and gave it to the old man.  Slight as the stimulant was, its effect on him was almost instantaneous.  His dull eyes brightened a little, and he went on in the same whispering tones as before: 

“He pulled the food out of his knapsack rather in a hurry, so that some of the other small things in it fell on the floor.  Among these was a pocketbook, which your father picked up and gave him back; and he put it in his coat-pocket—­there was a tear in one of the sides of the book, and through the hole some bank-notes bulged out.  I saw them, and so did your father (don’t move away, Gabriel; keep close, there’s nothing in me to shrink from).  Well, he shared his food, like an honest fellow, with us; and then put his hand in his pocket, and gave me four or five livres, and then lay down before the fire to go to sleep.  As he shut his eyes, your father looked at me in a way I didn’t like.  He’d been behaving very bitterly and desperately toward us for some time past, being soured about poverty, and your mother’s illness, and the constant crying out of you children for more to eat.  So when he told me to go and buy some