He held up the envelope Diane had placed on the desk earlier in the evening.

“Why don’t you open it?” she asked, in a whisper of suspense.

“I’ve been afraid to.  I’ve been afraid that it would prove him right in the one detail in which I’m able to put his word to the test.  I’ve been hoping against hope that you would clear yourself; but if this is in his favor—­”

“Open it,” she pleaded.

With the silver dagger she had laid ready to his hand he ripped up the envelope, and drew out the paper.

“Read it,” he said, passing it to her, without unfolding it.

Though it contained but one word, Diane took a long time to decipher it.  For minutes she stared at it, as though the power of comprehension had forsaken her.  Again and again she lifted her eyes to his, in sheer bewilderment, only to drop them then once more on the all but blank sheet in her hand.  At last it seemed as if her fingers had no more strength to hold it, and she let it flutter to the floor.

“He was right?”

The question came in a hoarse undertone, but Diane had no voice in which to reply.  She could only nod her head in dumb assent.

It grew late, and Derek Pruyn still sat in the position in which Diane had left him.  His hands rested clinched on the desk before him, while his eyes stared vacantly at the cluster of electric lights overhead.  He was living through the conversations with Bienville on shipboard.  He began with the first time he had noticed the tall, brown-eyed, black-bearded young Frenchman on the day when they sailed out of the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.  He passed on to their first interchange of casual remarks, leaning together over the deck-rail, and watching the lights of Para recede into the darkness.  It was in the hot, still evenings in the Caribbean Sea that, smoking in neighboring deck-chairs, they had first drifted into intimate talk, and the young man had begun to unburden himself.  They had been distinctly interesting to Derek, these glimpses of a joyous, idle, light-o’-love life, with a tragic element never very far below its surface, so different from his own gray career of business.  They not only beguiled the tedious nights, but they opened up vistas of romance to an imagination growing dull before its time, in the seriousness of large practical affairs.  In proportion as the young Frenchman showed himself willing to narrate, Derek became a sympathetic listener.  As Bienville told of his pursuit, now of this fair face, and now of that, Derek received the impression of a chase, in which the hunted engages not of necessity, but, like Atalanta, in sheer glee of excitement.  Like Atalanta, too, she was apt to over-estimate her speed, and to end in being caught.

It was not till after he had recounted a number of petites histoires, more or less amusing, that Bienville came to what he called “l’affaire la plus serieuse de ma vie,” while Derek drank in the tale with all the avidity the jealous heart brings to the augmentation of its pain.  To the idealizing purity of his conception of Diane any earthly failing on her part became the extremity of sin.  He had placed her so high that when she fell it was to no middle flight of guilt; as to the fallen angel, there was no choice for her, in his estimation, between heaven and the nether hell.