"I am! Very proud!" said Floriot, softly. There was a long pause. Floriot motioned his friend to a seat on the bench in the rustic house and sat beside him. He felt the need of comfort and counsel; for the hour that he had dreaded for years was upon him at last. He must tell Raymond the truth about his mother.
Twenty years of tireless searching had, indeed, proved utterly vain. There was every reason to believe that Jacqueline was dead and that the true story of the boy's mother might be buried with the three men and one woman who knew it. But this loophole of escape from the ordeal did not even present itself to a man with Floriot's stem sense of honor.
How would he take it? Floriot had no idea of defending himself or trying to distort the facts in the least degree. If anything, he would take more than his share of the blame for the wreck of his home. It would be terrible enough to tell Raymond that his mother had fallen, but what would he say when he was told that she had repented and pressed her forehead against her husband's shoes only to be hurled out, friendless, on the world—condemned to death, or worse than death?
Would the boy—at last knowing why he had grown up without a mother's love, and all the million priceless and nameless joys the phrase contains—rise in the wrath of his outraged youth and denounce the father who had robbed him? What would he say to the neglect that had driven his mother to shame and placed the brand on his own pure life? And now, whatever the cost, he must tell him....
In the twenty years they had pursued a common quest, these long silences were not unusual when the two friends met. Noel divined a little—but only a very little—of what was passing in the Other's mind. He had not foreseen this crisis.
"I never look at him without thinking of his mother!" he said, softly. "Louis, it's awful to think that in all these years we have never been able to find a trace."
Floriot's only reply was a somber shake of the head.
"God knows we've hunted!"
"I've done all I can—we've done all we can!" returned the husband in bitter hopelessness. "Detectives, advertising—everything! I haven't told you that I went to Monte Carlo a few days ago to see a woman that seemed to answer the description. The usual result!" And he gazed out across the garden.
"And last week I thought I had come to the end of the hunt," returned Noel. "The first night that I reached Paris I dropped into a music hall and thought that I recognized her on the stage. I got an introduction to the woman. She had Jacqueline's eyes to a line almost, but that was all. I was sure from the front of the house! You remember those eyes?"