ed?

"And yet why did that sudden change take place in me?" he asked. "Why did
I go against the evidence? Why did I credit an incredible fact? Why did I
admit the inadmissible? Why? Well, no doubt, because truth has an accent
that rings in the ears in a manner all its own. On the one side, every
proof, every fact, every reality, every certainty; on the other, a story,
a story told by one of the three criminals, and therefore, presumptively,
absurd and untrue from start to finish. But a story told in a frank
voice, a clear, dispassionate, closely woven story, free from
complications or improbabilities, a story which supplied no positive
solution, but which, by its very honesty, obliged any impartial mind to
reconsider the solution arrived at. I believed the story."

The explanation which Lupin gave me was not complete. I asked:

"And Florence Levasseur?"

"Florence?"

"Yes, you don't tell me what you thought. What was your opinion about
her? Everything tended to incriminate her not only in your eyes, because,
logically speaking, she had taken part in all the attempts to murder you,
but also in the eyes of the police. They knew that she used to pay
Sauverand clandestine visits at his house on the Boulevard
Richard-Wallace. They had found her photograph in Inspector Verot's
memorandum-book, and then--and then all the rest: your accusations, your
certainties. Was all that modified by Sauverand's story? To your mind,
was Florence innocent or guilty?"

He hesitated, seemed on the point of replying directly and frankly to my
question, but could not bring himself to do so, and said:

"I wished to have confidence. In order to act, I must have full and
entire confidence, whatever doubts might still assail me, whatever
darkness might still enshroud this or that part of the adventure. I
therefore believed. And, believing, I acted according to my belief."

Acting, to Don Luis Perenna, during those hours of forced inactivity,
consisted solely in perpetually repeating to himself Gaston Sauverand's
account of the events. He tried to reconstitute it in all its details, to
remember the very least sentences, the apparently most insignificant
phrases. And he examined those sentences, scrutinized those phrases one
by one, in order to extract such particle of the truth as they contained.

For the truth was there. Sauverand had said so and Perenna did not doubt
it. The whole sinister affair, all that constituted the case of the
Morn