In a prologue set in Paris in the year 1924, a young 14-year-old Gilda Bessé, the daughter of a French people aristocrat and an emotionally unstable United States mother, reluctantly is told by a Fortune-telling that the Chiromancy doesn't extend past the age of 34. Fast forward to a rainy night in 1933, when Gilda stumbles into the room of Guy Malyon, an Irish people who is a first-year scholarship student at Cambridge University. She has had a lover's quarrel with one of the University don, and rather than turn her out into the storm, Guy gallantly allows her to spend the night. Later, they become lovers, but the two are separated when Gilda's mother dies and she opts to leave England. A few years later, Guy sees her as an Extra (actor) in a Hollywood film, and shortly after he coincidentally receives a letter from her inviting him to visit her in Paris, where she's working as a photography.