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 mère!" Diane called, with a nervous laugh, as Mrs.