"And Florence Levasseur?"
"Florence?"
"Yes, you don't tell me what you thought. What was your opinion about her? Everything tended to incriminate her not only in your eyes, because, logically speaking, she had taken part in all the attempts to murder you, but also in the eyes of the police. They knew that she used to pay Sauverand clandestine visits at his house on the Boulevard Richard-Wallace. They had found her photograph in Inspector Vérot's memorandum-book, and then—and then all the rest: your accusations, your certainties. Was all that modified by Sauverand's story? To your mind, was Florence innocent or guilty?"
He hesitated, seemed on the point of replying directly and frankly to my question, but could not bring himself to do so, and said:
"I wished to have confidence. In order to act, I must have full and entire confidence, whatever doubts might still assail me, whatever darkness might still enshroud this or that part of the adventure. I therefore believed. And, believing, I acted according to my belief."
Acting, to Don Luis Perenna, during those hours of forced inactivity, consisted solely in perpetually repeating to himself Gaston Sauverand's account of the events. He tried to reconstitute it in all its details, to remember the very least sentences, the apparently most insignificant phrases. And he examined those sentences, scrutinized those phrases one by one, in order to extract such particle of the truth as they contained.
For the truth was there. Sauverand had said so and Perenna did not doubt it. The whole sinister affair, all that constituted the case of the Mornington inheritance and the tragedy of the Boulevard Suchet, all that could throw light upon the plot hatched against Marie Fauville, all that could explain the undoing of Sauverand and Florence—all this lay in Sauverand's story. Don Luis had only to understand, and the truth would appear like the moral which we draw from some obscure fable.
Don Luis did not once deviate from his method. If any objection suggested itself to his mind, he at once replied:
"Very well. It may be that I am wrong and that Sauverand's story will not enlighten me on any point capable of guiding me. It may be that the truth lies outside it. But am I in a position to get at the truth in any other way? All that I possess as an instrument of research, without attaching undue importance to certain gleams of light which the regular appearance of the mysterious letters has shed upon the case, all that I possess is Gaston Sauverand's story. Must I not make use of it?"
And, once again, as when one follows a path by another person's tracks, he began to live through the adventure which Sauverand had been through. He compared it with the picture of it which he had imagined until then. The two were in opposition; but could not the very clash of their opposition be made to produce a spark of light?