n we met. I was to love her always and to love her more
and more."

"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 wr