"'It is a good season for traveling, I believe!' she said, when the door had closed behind him."
"'Captain Bertin could not have chosen a better,' I assured her."
"Her composure was more than wonderful; by no sign, no hint of weakness or ill ease, did she make any appeal to me. To my sympathy, my admiration, my devotion, she offered only that bright surface of her schooled manner and disciplined emotions. While her house crumbled about her ears, while her world failed her, she deviated not a hairbreadth from the line of social amenity."
"'But he is hardly likely to have company?' she asked again."
"As for me, I had visions of the kind of company that was due to him —a formal sons-officer with a warrant of arrest, a file of stolid soldiers, with rigid faces and curious eyes."
"But I answered her in her own manner."
"'There is certainly that drawback,' I said, and I thought—I hoped—
I saw gratitude in her answering look."
"Then Bertin returned, with the hat of a civilian and a cloak that covered him to the ears. I saw their farewell—his look of appeal at her, the smile of amusement which answered it. And next I was seated beside him in the fiacre and she was framed in the door, looking after us, slender and erect, pale and subtle, smiling still with a manner as of weariness. It is thus that I remember her best."
"It was not till we were out of her sight that Bertin spoke. He lit a cigarette and stared up at the great white stars."
"'She spoilt my luck from the first,' he said."