Table?  Only a big heap of old stones!  What with the storm, and thinking I was going to die, and being afraid about your father, I must have been light-headed.  Don’t give another thought to that nonsense, Gabriel!  I’m better now.  We shall all live to laugh at poor grandfather for talking nonsense about crime and bloodshed in his sleep.  Ah, poor old man—­last night—­light-headed—­fancies and nonsense of an old man—­why don’t you laugh at it?  I’m laughing—­so light-headed, so light—­”

He stopped suddenly.  A low cry, partly of terror and partly of pain, escaped him; the look of pining anxiety and imbecile cunning which had distorted his face while he had been speaking, faded from it forever.  He shivered a little, breathed heavily once or twice, then became quite still.

Had he died with a falsehood on his lips?

Gabriel looked round and saw that the cottage door was closed, and that his father was standing against it.  How long he had occupied that position, how many of the old man’s last words he had heard, it was impossible to conjecture, but there was a lowering suspicion in his harsh face as he now looked away from the corpse to his son, which made Gabriel shudder; and the first question that he asked, on once more approaching the bedside, was expressed in tones which, quiet as they were, had a fearful meaning in them.

“What did your grandfather talk about last night?” he asked.

Gabriel did not answer.  All that he had heard, all that he had seen, all the misery and horror that might yet be to come, had stunned his mind.  The unspeakable dangers of his present position were too tremendous to be realized.  He could only feel them vaguely in the weary torpor that oppressed his heart; while in every other direction the use of his faculties, physical and mental, seemed to have suddenly and totally abandoned him.

“Is your tongue wounded, son Gabriel, as well as your arm?” his father went on, with a bitter laugh.  “I come back to you, saved by a miracle; and you never speak to me.  Would you rather I had died than the old man there?  He can’t hear you now—­why shouldn’t you tell me what nonsense he was talking last night?  You won’t?  I say you shall!” (He crossed the room and put his back to the door.) “Before either of us leave this place, you shall confess it!  You know that my duty to the Church bids me to go at once and tell the priest of your grandfather’s death.  If I leave that duty unfulfilled, remember it is through your fault! You keep me here—­for here I stop till I’m obeyed.  Do you hear that, idiot?  Speak!  Speak instantly, or you shall repeat it to the day of your death!  I ask again—­what did your grandfather say to you when he was wandering in his mind last night?”

“He spoke of a crime committed by another, and guiltily kept secret by him,” answered Gabriel, slowly and sternly.  “And this morning he denied his own words with his last living breath.  But last night, if he spoke the truth—­”