He was to dine there that very evening.  Even taking into account the signal service Duchemin had rendered, this wasn’t easy to believe when one remembered the tradition of social conservatism among French gentlefolk.  Still, it was true:  Duchemin of the open road was bidden to dine en famille at the Chateau de Montalais.  In his pocket lay the invitation, penned in the crabbed antique hand of Madame de Sevenie and fetched to the hotel by a servitor quite as crabbed and antique:  Monsieur Duchemin would confer a true pleasure by enabling the ladies of the chateau to testify, even so inadequately, to their sense of obligation, etc.; with a postscript to say that Monsieur d’Aubrac was resting easily, his wound mending as rapidly as heart could wish.

Of course Duchemin was going, had in fact already despatched his acceptance by the hand of the same messenger.  Equally of course he knew that he ought not to go.  For a man of his years he was, as a matter of training and habit, amazingly honest with himself.  He knew quite well what bent his inclination toward visiting the Chateau de Montalais just once before effecting, what he was resolved upon, a complete evanishment from the ken of its people.  He had yet to hold one minute of private conversation with Eve de Montalais, he had of her no sign to warrant his thinking her anything but utterly indifferent to him; and yet....

No; he wasn’t ass enough to dream that he was in love with the woman; to the contrary, he was wise enough, knew himself well enough, to know that he could be, easily, and would be, given half a chance to lose his head.

His warning had been clear beyond mistake, in that hour in the motor car on the road from La Roque to Nant, when Nature, 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.