“You lie!” cried Don Luis, losing his self-restraint.  “I saw the two of you yesterday in the train that brought you back from Alencon—­”

Gaston Sauverand looked at Florence.  She sat silent, with her hands to her face and her elbows on her knees.  Without replying to Don Luis’s exclamation, he went on: 

“Marie also loved me.  She admitted it, but made me swear that I would never try to obtain from her more than the purest friendship would allow.  I kept my oath.  We enjoyed a few weeks of incomparable happiness.  Hippolyte Fauville, who had become enamoured of a music-hall singer, was often away.

“I took a good deal of trouble with the physical training of the little boy Edmond, whose health was not what it should be.  And we also had with us, between us, the best of friends, the most devoted and affectionate counsellor, who staunched our wounds, kept up our courage, restored our gayety, and bestowed some of her own strength and dignity upon our love.  Florence was there.”

Don Luis felt his heart beating faster.  Not that he attached the least credit to Gaston Sauverand’s words; but he had every hope of arriving, through those words, at the real truth.  Perhaps, also, he was unconsciously undergoing the influence of Gaston Sauverand, whose apparent frankness and sincerity of tone caused him a certain surprise.

Sauverand continued: 

“Fifteen years before, my elder brother, Raoul Sauverand, had picked up at Buenos Aires, where he had gone to live, a little girl, the orphan daughter of some friends.  At his death he entrusted the child, who was then fourteen, to an old nurse who had brought me up and who had accompanied my brother to South America.  The old nurse brought the child to me and herself died of an accident a few days after her arrival in France....  I took the little girl to Italy to friends, where she worked and studied and became—­what she is.

“Wishing to live by her own resources, she accepted a position as teacher in a family.  Later I recommended her to my Fauville cousins with whom I found her at Palmero as governess to the boy Edmond and especially as the friend, the dear and devoted friend, of Marie Fauville....  She was mine, also, at that happy time, which was so sunny and all too short.  Our happiness, in fact—­the happiness of all three of us—­was to be wrecked in the most sudden and tantalizing fashion.

“Every evening I used to write in a diary the daily life of my love, an uneventful life, without hope or future before it, but eager and radiant.  Marie Fauville was extolled in it as a goddess.  Kneeling down to write, I sang litanies of her beauty, and I also used to invent, as a poor compensation, wholly imaginary scenes, in which she said all the things which she might have said but did not, and promised me all the happiness which we had voluntarily renounced.