suddenly became ominous; while something within herself
seemed to say, "The hour is at hand!"

The hour is at hand! Standing in the middle of one of the gorgeous
rooms, she repeated the words softly, marking as she did so their
incongruity to herself and her surroundings. The note of fatality jarred
on the harmony of this well-ordered life. It was preposterous, that she,
who had always been hedged round and sheltered by pomp and circumstance,
should now in her middle age be menaced with calamity. She dragged
herself over to one of the long mirrors and gazed at her reflection
pityingly.

The twitter of birds startled her with the knowledge that it was dawn.
From the Embassy George and Diane were to go on to two or three great
houses, but surely they should be home by this time! The reflection
meant the renewal of her fear. Where was her son? Was he really with his
wife, or had the moment come when he must take the law into his own
hands, after their French manner, to avenge himself or her? She knew
nothing about duelling, but she had the Anglo-Saxon mother's dread of
it. She had always hoped that, notwithstanding the social code under
which he lived, George would keep clear of any such brutal
senselessness; but lately she had begun to fear that the conventions of
the world would prove the stronger, and that the time when they would do
so was not far away.

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 wr