Pulling back the curtains from one of the windows, she opened it and stepped out on a balcony, where the long strip of the Quai d’Orsay stretched below her, in gray and silent emptiness.  On the swift, leaden-colored current of the Seine, spanned here and there by ghostly bridges, mysterious barges plied weirdly through the twilight.  Up on the left the Arc de Triomphe began to emerge dimly out of night, while down on the right the line of the Louvre lay, black and sinister, beneath the towers and spires that faintly detached themselves against the growing saffron of the morning.  High above all else, the domes of the Sacred Heart were white with the rays of the unrisen sun, like those of the City which came down from God.

It was so different from the cheerful Paris of broad daylight that she was drawing back with a shudder, when over the Pont de la Concorde she discerned the approach of a motor-brougham.

Closing the window, she hurried to the stairway.  It was still night within the house, and the one electric light left burning drew forth dull gleams from the wrought-metal arabesques of the splendidly sweeping balustrades.  When, on the ringing of the bell, the door opened and she went down, she had the strange sensation of entering on a new era in her life.

Though she recalled that impression in after years, for the moment she saw nothing but Diane, all in vivid red, in the act of letting the voluminous black cloak fall from her shoulders into the sleepy footman’s hands.

“Bonjour, petite mere!” Diane called, with a nervous laugh, as Mrs. Eveleth paused on the lower steps of the stairs.

“Where is George?”

She could not keep the tone of anxiety out of her voice, but Diane answered, with ready briskness: 

“George?  I don’t know.  Hasn’t he come home?”

“You must know he hasn’t come home.  Weren’t you together?”

“We were together till—­let me see!—­whose house was it?—­till after the cotillon at Madame de Vaudreuil’s.  He left me there and went to the Jockey Club with Monsieur de Melcourt, while I drove on to the Rochefoucaulds’.”

She turned away toward the dining-room, but it was impossible not to catch the tremor in her voice over the last words.  In her ready English there was a slight foreign intonation, as well as that trace of an Irish accent which quickly yields to emotion.  Standing at the table in the dining-room where refreshments had been laid, she poured out a glass of wine, and Mrs. Eveleth could see from the threshold that she drank it thirstily, as one who before everything else needs a stimulant to keep her up.  At the entrance of her mother-in-law she was on her guard again, and sank languidly into the nearest chair.  “Oh, I’m so hungry!” she yawned, pulling off her gloves, and pretending to nibble at a sandwich.  “Do sit down,” she went on, as Mrs. Eveleth remained standing.  “I should think you’d be hungry, too.”