“He said to her: ‘When you married me I told you I had no family; that was not quite the truth. I have a brother. He is a convict serving sentence in Noumea. I did not tell you because the thing was painful to me as death.’
“You can fancy her feelings, struck by a bombshell like that, but she says nothing and he goes on telling her the yarn he ought to have told her before they were married.
“This brother, Charles Duplessis, had been rather a wild young scamp; he lived in the Rue du Mont Thabor, a little street behind the Rue St. Honoré in Paris, and he made his money on the Stock Exchange. Then he got into terrible trouble. He was accused of a forgery committed by another man, but could not prove his innocence. Armand was certain of his innocence but could do nothing, and Charles was convicted and sent to New Caledonia.
“Well, Madame Duplessis sat swallowing that fact, and when he’d done speaking, she sat swallowing some more as if her throat was dry. Then she says to Armand:
“‘Your brother is innocent, then,’ she says.
“‘As innocent as yourself,’ he answers her, ‘and it is the knowledge of all this that has caused my illness and depression.
“‘Before I was married I was forgetting it all, but married to the woman I love, rich, happy, with enviable surroundings, Charles came and knocked at my door, saying: “Remember me in your happiness.”’
“‘But can we do nothing for him?’ asked Madame Duplessis.
“‘Nothing,’ replied Armand, ‘unless we can help him to escape.’
“Then he went on to tell her how he had not wanted to come on this long voyage at first, feeling that there was some fate in the business, and that it would surely bring him somehow or another to Noumea; then, how the idea had come to him at Ceylon that he might be able to help Charles to escape.