“Hippolyte Fauville found the diary....  His anger was something terrible.  His first impulse was to get rid of Marie.  But in the face of his wife’s attitude, of the proofs of her innocence which she supplied, of her inflexible refusal to consent to a divorce, and of her promise never to see me again, he recovered his calmness....  I left, with death in my soul.  Florence left, too, dismissed.  And never, mark me, never, since that fatal hour, did I exchange a single word with Marie.  But an indestructible love united us, a love which neither absence nor time was to weaken.”

He stopped for a moment, as though to read in Don Luis’s face the effect produced by his story.  Don Luis did not conceal his anxious attention.  What astonished him most was Gaston Sauverand’s extraordinary calmness, the peaceful expression of his eyes, the quiet ease with which he set forth, without hurrying, almost slowly and so very simply, the story of that family tragedy.

“What an actor!” he thought.

And as he thought it, he remembered that Marie Fauville had given him the same impression.  Was he then to hark back to his first conviction and believe Marie guilty, a dissembler like her accomplice, a dissembler like Florence?  Or was he to attribute a certain honesty to that man?

He asked: 

“And afterward?”

“Afterward I travelled about.  I resumed my life of work and pursued my studies wherever I went, in my bedroom at the hotels, and in the public laboratories of the big towns.”

“And Mme. Fauville?”

“She lived in Paris in her new house.  Neither she nor her husband ever referred to the past.”

“How do you know?  Did she write to you?”

“No.  Marie is a woman who does not do her duty by halves; and her sense of duty is strict to excess.  She never wrote to me.  But Florence, who had accepted a place as secretary and reader to Count Malonyi, your predecessor in this house, used often to receive Marie’s visits in her lodge downstairs.

“They did not speak of me once, did they, Florence?  Marie would not have allowed it.  But all her life and all her soul were nothing but love and passionate memories.  Isn’t that so, Florence?

“At last,” he went on slowly, “weary of being so far away from her, I returned to Paris.  That was our undoing....  It was about a year ago.  I took a flat in the Avenue du Roule and went to it in the greatest secrecy, so that Hippolyte Fauville might not know of my return.  I was afraid of disturbing Marie’s peace of mind.  Florence alone knew, and came to see me from time to time.  I went out little, only after dark, and in the most secluded parts of the Bois.  But it happened—­for our most heroic resolutions sometimes fail us—­one Wednesday night, at about eleven o’clock, my steps led me to the Boulevard Suchet, without my noticing it, and I went past Marie’s house.

“It was a warm and fine night and, as luck would have it, Marie was at her window.  She saw me, I was sure of it, and knew me; and my happiness was so great that my legs shook under me as I walked away.