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-Champenoise 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?...