The friendship of Baron Hafner for the Countess, whose financial adviser he was, should have been for Dorsenne a reason for avoiding such a subject, the more so as he was convinced of the man’s dislike for him.  The Baron could, by a single word perfidiously repeated, injure him very much with Alba’s mother.  But the novelist, similar on that point to the majority of professional observers, had only the power of analysis of a retrospective order.  Never had his keen intelligence served him to avoid one of those slight errors of conversation which are important mistakes on the pitiful checker-board of life.  Happily for him, he cherished no ambition except for his pleasure and his art, without which he would have found the means of making for himself, gratuitously, enough enemies to clear all the academies.

He, therefore, chose the moment when the Baron arrived at the landing on the first floor, pausing somewhat out of breath, and after the agent had verified their passes, to say to his companion: 

“Have you seen Gorka since his arrival?”

“What?  Is Boleslas here?” asked Justus Hafner, who manifested his astonishment in no other manner than by adding:  “I thought he was still in Poland.”

“I have not seen him myself,” said Dorsenne.  He already regretted having spoken too hastily.  It is always more prudent not to spread the first report.  But the ignorance of that return of Countess Steno’s best friend, who saw her daily, struck the young man with such surprise that he could not resist adding:  “Some one, whose veracity I can not doubt, met him this morning.”  Then, brusquely:  “Does not this sudden return make you fearful?”

“Fearful?” repeated the Baron.  “Why so?” As he uttered those words he glanced at the writer with his usual impassive expression, which, however, a very slight sign, significant to those who knew him, belied.  In exchanging those few words the two men had passed into the first room of “objects of art,” having belonged to the apartment of “His Eminence Prince d’Ardea,” as the catalogue said, and the Baron did not raise the gold glass which he held at the end of his nose when near the smallest display of bric-a-brac, as was his custom.  As he walked slowly through the collection of busts and statues of that first room, called “Marbles” on the catalogue, without glancing with the eye of a practised judge at the Gobelin tapestry upon the walls, it must have been that he considered as very grave the novelist’s revelation.  The latter had said too much not to continue: 

“Well, I who have not been connected with Madame Steno for years, like you, trembled for her when that return was announced to me.  She does not know what Gorka is when he is jealous, or of what he is capable.”