ture, as she sometimes
will, incautiously had shown her hand to one whom she herself had
schooled to read shrewdly, letting him discern what was her will with
him, the snare that was laid for his feet and in which he must soon
find himself trapped beyond extrication ... always providing he lacked
the wit and resolution to fly his peril, who knew through bitterest of
learning that love was never for him.

Now he had seen Madame de Montalais another time, and had found that
she fitted to the sweetest detail of perfection his ideal of Woman.

On the previous afternoon, meeting the ladies of the chateau by
arrangement in the bureau of the maire, Duchemin had sat opposite and
watched and listened to Eve de Montalais for upwards of two hours--as
completely devoted to covert study of her as if she had been the one
woman in the room, as if the girl Louise, Madame de Sevenie, and the
officials and functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world
with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he
had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the
uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that
moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person
which had the night before so stirred his pulses.

Posed with consummate grace in a comfortless chair, a figure of slender
elegance in her half-mourning, she had narrated quietly her version of
last night's misadventure, an occasional tremor of humour lightening
the moving modulations of her voice. A deep and vibrant voice,
contralto in quality, hinting at hidden treasures of strength in the
woman whose superficial mind it expressed. A fair woman, slim but
round, with brown eyes level and calm, a translucent skin of matchless
texture, hair the hue of bronze laced with intimations of gold ...

Her story told, and taken down in longhand by a withered clerk, she
supplied without reluctance or trace of embarrassment such intimate
personal information as was necessary in order that her signature to
the document might be acceptable to the State.

Her age, she said, was twenty-nine; her birthplace, the City of New
York; her parents, Edmund Anstruther, once of Bath, England, but at the
time of her birth a naturalised citizen of the United States, and Eve
Marie Anstruther, nee Legendre, of Paris. Both were dead. In June 1914
she had married, in Paris, Victor Maurice de Montalais, who had been
killed in action at La Fere-Champen