CHAPTER I
SOWING THE WINDS

I suppose there is no man who would care to have sunlight in all his life; but I hardly think there is one who could have sunk to the deep as I did, and yet have been coward enough to live, as I do I, Gaspard de Vibrac.

As I write these lines in my study in lonely Vibrac, the four white stars on my shield, carved in relief above the fireplace, seem to burn red with the memory of my shame, and nothing can wipe out that stain in my scutcheon nothing, nothing!

Thank God! I am the last of my house! Thank God! No young feet patter up and down the long corridors; no young voices shrill through these silent rooms. They would grow up to know me as the Shame of Vibrac. The very villagers, my serfs, dogs, whom I could send to thecarcau with a nod of my head, scowl as they doff their caps to me, and the children shiver and shrink behind their mothers skirts on those rare occasions when I come out of the château. I suppose they know the story and I live!

And is this the pity of God? He has spared my life. Good men, honorable gentlemen, my friends I had such friends once have died like vermin. The Lake of Geneva holds all that is left of Maligny,le beau cadet, as we called him; the Vidame died at the galleys, chained to the scum of mankind. But he died, Maligny died, even Achon died, that merciless priest! And I live as a leper! I have come to know that death is the pity of God.

Forty years back there was life and strength, a hot heart, and no count kept of the score. Since then I have paid and paid; but the hideous total of my debt yet looms as large as ever.

As I look back into the past, it seems but as yesterday to me that gray afternoon, the day following the St.