"He would have been wiser to stay and fight it out. The very fact of his flight confesses his guilt."
"Perhaps he did not remember that until too late."
"And now nothing can clear him. How sad for him! A chance meeting with one who is not his friend, a whispered word to the Préfecture, or the nearest agent de police, and within an hour he finds himself in the Santé."
"Poor chap!" said Lanyard with a doleful shake of the head.
"I, too, pity him," the woman declared. "Monsieur: against my prejudice, your faith in Duchemin has persuaded me. I am convinced that he is innocent."
"How good you are!" "It makes me glad I have so well forgotten ever meeting him. I do not believe I should know him if I found him here, in this very restaurant, even seated by my side."
"It is mademoiselle now whose heart is great and kind."
"You may believe it well."
"And does mademoiselle's forgetfulness, perhaps, extend even farther into the so dead past?"
"But, monsieur, I was a mere child when I first came to Paris, before the War. How could anyone reasonably expect my memory of those innocent girlish days to be exact? Regard that, even then, I met people by hundreds, as a young girl studying for the stage must. Is it likely one face would stand out in my memory more than another?"