“Mother Rimbaut was examined and she told the magistrate Carstairs had been to the shop years ago and had carried on a flirtation with Marianne; but she said nothing about Cerise—she had never said anything about that matter to any one but me. Months passed and the wounded man lay in hospital half in and half out of death’s door. He had plenty of time to think of his sins and there is no doubt but that he repented of them, for he made a full confession, saying he had wronged her and that he deserved what she had done to him.
“At the trial she would say neither yes nor no. Nothing but ‘I have done what I have done.’ She seemed indifferent to everything and after six months’ imprisonment she went back to her shop just as you see her today, not mad, yet not sane. As for Carstairs, he left the island and we have heard no more of him.
“But to me the interest of the whole business lies in the question: did she stab that man to revenge Cerise or herself? And also in the thought that Monsieur Carstairs, who was responsible for the death of Cerise, had, to his own knowledge, never even seen the girl. He had heard Marianne speak of her sister, but as they were never in the shop together he did not know of the extraordinary likeness.
“To this day, if he is alive, Monsieur Carstairs does not know that he is responsible for a woman’s death. He will not know till the judgment comes; and that is a thought to give one pause, for does any man know his full account or the consequences of his sins?”
Later that day, toward evening, finding myself in the Rue Austerlitz I went into the Maison Ribot out of curiosity and to buy a packet of cigarettes. Marianne was behind the counter looking just the same as when I had seen her passing Roche’s restaurant, but sane enough in her business methods and making not a centime’s mistake in the change. As she handed me my cigarettes with the indifference of an automatic figure and with scarcely a glance, the commonplace things of that little shop seemed of more tragic importance than the girl, and the commonplace sounds; the voices of the passers-by in the street, the laughter of a child, the click of knitting needles from the gloom behind the piled baskets, a sound microscopic and intermittent as the ticking of a death-watch beetle or the crawling of a snail on the pane.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the August 1924 issue of Everybody’s Magazine.