“She didn’t think twice, but came, taking a cab and being landed in a little old back street at the door of a house that stood between a thieves’ café and a rag shop.
“Up the stairs she went, following the old woman, and into a room where his royal highness was lying with a jug of whisky on the floor beside him and a hectic blush on his cheeks.
“‘I’m dying,’ he says, ‘and I want to tell you something you ought to know. I was sent to New Caledonia,’ he says, ‘for a robbery committed by another man.’
“She thought he was raving, but she says, ‘Go on.’
“‘Armand and I were twins,’ he says, ‘as like as two peas. Armand could do nothing. He stayed in Paris whilst poor Charles, that’s me, went making roads on Noumea. Then you married him.’
“‘But you are Armand,’ she cries, ‘you are my husband, or am I mad?’
“‘Not a bit,’ says he, ‘I’m Charles, his twin brother.’
“Then she recollected how from the first she thought Armand had changed. She sat down on the side of the bed because her limbs were giving, and he goes on.
“‘A year ago, you and him came in a big yacht to Noumea, and the Governor sent me one night to have a talk with him. When we were alone, he told me how his heart had been burning a hole in him for years, how he had married a rich woman—that’s you—and how, when he was happy and rich his heart had burned him worse, so that the doctors not knowing what was wrong with him had ordered him a sea voyage.’ Then Charles goes on to tell how Armand had come to the conclusion that even if he helped Charles to escape, this likeness between them would lead surely to the giving away of the whole show, make trouble among the crew of the yacht, and so on—besides the fact that it was next to impossible for a man to escape from Noumea in the ordinary way, but said Armand, ‘We can change places, and no one will know. Strip and change here and now,’ he says; ‘the guards are outside. I’ll take your place and go to prison, and you’ll be free. I’ve got a scissors here and two snips will make our hair the same, and by good luck we are both clean shaven. You’ve done half your sentence of ten years, and I’ll do the other half,’ he says; ‘the only bargain I’ll make is that you’ll respect my wife and live apart from her, and, after a while, you’ll break the news to her, and, maybe, when I’m free in five years she’ll forgive me.’
“Charles finishes up by excusing himself for the drink, saying if she’d served five years without the chance of a decent wet all that time, she’d maybe have done as he’d done.