Then she began her story. It was as if everything had been bottled up in her for years and now at last it was released, to spurt out in a flood tide of verbosity, being shocking, horrifying, disgusting and infinitely pathetic all at the same time.

She held both the Grand Duke and Mistral spellbound, for they could neither stop her nor do anything else but listen to the tale she unfolded.

She told them how she had served Emilie for nineteen years, but she had known her before that when as children they had gone to school together in Brittany. She spoke of Emilie’s strange nature, of the burning hatred she had of her father and the fierce possessive love she bore her half sister, Alice. She told of Mistral’s birth, the revenge Emilie had planned, which she had nurtured and fed until it became the greatest and most important thing in her whole life. She told them how Emilie had set off for Paris, determined to make enough money to pay Mistral’s school fees, how she had married Monsieur Bleuet and sent to Brittany for Jeanne to come and keep his house with her.

And as the tale of those years was unfolded in Jeanne’s weak, tearful voice, Mistral began to see how Emilie’s desire for revenge and retribution had gradually replaced all that was kindly and decent in her nature. It was a definite, positive evil which had poisoned her soul as some deadly poison might have destroyed her body. She had kept on Monsieur Bleuet’s notorious establishment because it brought her money and it was money she needed for her vengeance.

She had worked fanatically hard for the same reason, never taking a holiday, never indulging herself in any way –saving, scraping, cheeseparing for the day of her reckoning with the Grand Duke.

At last Jeanne came to the moment when Emilie’s plans had been threatened by Henry Dulton and rather than submit to being blackmailed she had murdered him in the Hôtel de Paris.

Only then, as the full horror of what had been done came to her, did Mistral feel a sudden agony within herself as if a vast hand squeezed her heart. For the first time since her happiness in the Chapel of St. Dévote had been snatched from her, to leave her alone in an utter darkness, the tears came slowly and painfully into her eyes and began to trickle down her cheeks.

And while Jeanne was still speaking, the full horror of her Aunt’s history burst over her. At last she understood why the Rajah had insulted her, why Robert’s love had turned to hatred and loathing. She saw it all too clearly, and because the abyss of evil through which she had walked unscathed appeared so horrifying in retrospect, she could only cry like a frightened child who still weeps after the real danger is past.