ite 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.

"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