oise on the ninth of September
following. Her home? The Chateau de Montalais.

On the hand she stripped in order to sign her deposition Duchemin saw a
blue diamond of such superb water that this amateur of precious stones
caught his breath for sheer wonder at its beauty and excellence and
worth. Such jewels, he knew, were few and far to seek outside the
collections of princes.

Out of these simple elements imagination reconstructed a tragedy, a
tragedy of life singularly close to the truth as he later came to learn
it, a story not at all calculated to lessen his interest in the woman.

Such women, he knew, are the product of a cultivation seldom to be
achieved by poverty. This one had been made before, and not by, her
marriage. Her father, then, had commanded riches. And when one knew, as
Duchemin knew, what delights New York has for young women of wealth and
fashion, one perceived a radiant and many-coloured background for this
drab life of a recluse, expatriate from the high world of her
inheritance, which Eve de Montalais must lead, and for the six years of
her premature widowhood must have led, in that lonely chateau, buried
deep in the loneliest hills of all France, the sole companion and
comfort of her husband's bereaved sister and grandmother, chained by
sorrow to their sorrow, by an inexorable reluctance to give them pain
by seeming to slight the memory of the husband, brother and grandson
through turning her face toward the world of life and light and gaiety
of which she was so essentially a part, isolate from which she was so
inevitably a thing existing without purpose or effect.

How often, Duchemin wondered, had she in hours of solitude and
restlessness felt her spirit yearning toward Paris, the nearest gateway
to her world, and had cried out: How long, O Lord! how long?...

The mellow resonance of a two-toned automobile horn, disturbing the
early evening hush and at the same time Duchemin's meditations,
recalled him to Nant in time to see a touring car of majestic
proportions and mien which, coming from the south, from the direction
of the railroad and Nimes, was sweeping a fine curve round two sides of
the public square. Arriving in front of the Hotel de l'Univers it
executed a full stop and stood curbed yet palpitant, purring heavily:
an impressive brute of a car, all shining silver plate and lustrous
green paint and gold, the newest model of the costliest and best
automobile manufactured in France.