Floriot continued to stare at him with a mixture of wonder and resentment. Then a sudden thought made him catch his breath with a sharp hiss. His figure relaxed and he took a half-step forward.
"Noel! ... Noel!" he gasped. "Jacqueline! ... She was the woman—you loved!"
The blue eyes did not waver.
"Yes, it was Jacqueline! And," he added, bitterly, "I loved her better, if not more, than you did!..."
In the nerve-wracking night Floriot had exhausted, he thought, every emotion. This last shock numbed him. He groped his way to a chair and with both hands to his head tried to collect his wandering mind and grasp the meaning of Noel's admission.
Noel had loved Jacqueline! This was the woman for whom he had tried to kill himself! His brain reeled dizzily and he stared down at the carpet with unseeing eyes. It put his friend in a strange and almost incomprehensible light. All that he had said and done now took on a different aspect. Noel had loved her! He still loved her and defended her! All that his friend had said, all that Jacqueline had said, his talk with Madame Varenne—all swept back over him with a new meaning! Was he wrong? Should he have obeyed the impulse to forgive when she sobbed at his feet—the impulse that he strangled almost at the cost of reason?... Noel was speaking but he barely heard the words.
"I loved her for years before your marriage," he was saying. "Many and many a time I made up my mind to speak to her but—I loved her more than I could tell her! I was afraid to risk everything on a word. Again and again I went away on my long wanderings, trying to show myself that I wanted nothing more than my freedom. The farther I traveled from St. Pierre the more miserable I grew and I always came back more in love than ever."
There was no grief or pain in his voice. He was still the judge denouncing the culprit.
"Then I began to think that she was falling in love with you! I tried again to take my life in my hands and to tell her I loved, but I couldn't. I ran away again, and this time I made up my mind that I would never come back. I got as far as Messina and bought my ticket for the next east-bound P. & O. Then I deliberately missed the boat and the next one. I couldn't drag myself up the gangplank!
"The next day, without hardly knowing how it happened, I found myself in the railway station, on my way back to France. I had nearly reached her house when I heard of your betrothal!"