a solution of the problem, that she was a girl of extraordinary inward energy, who, both aware of her mother’s intrigues and detesting them with an equal hatred, had planned to precipitate the two men upon each other.  For a young girl the undertaking is great.  I will go to the Countess’s to-morrow night, and I will amuse myself by watching Alba, to see. . .  If she is innocent, my deed will be inoffensive.  If perchance she is not?”

It is vain to profess to one’s own heart a complaisant dandyism of misanthropy.  Such reflections leave behind them a tinge of a remorse, above all when they are, as these, absolutely whimsical and founded on a simple paradox of dilettantism.  Dorsenne experienced a feeling of shame when he awoke the following morning, and, thinking of the mystery of the letters received by Gorka, he recalled the criminal romance he had constructed around the charming and tender form of his little friend; happily for his nerves, which were strained by the consideration of the formidable problem.  If it is not some one in the Countess’s circle, who has written those letters?  He received, on rising, a voluminous package of proofs with the inscription:  “Urgent.”  He was preparing to give to the public a collection of his first articles, under the title of ’Poussiere d’Idees.’

Dorsenne was a faithful literary worker.  Usually, involved titles serve to hide in a book-stall shop—­made goods, and romance writers or dramatic authors who pride themselves on living to write, and who seek inspiration elsewhere than in regularity of habits and the work-table, have their efforts marked from the first by sterility.  Obscure or famous, rich or poor, an artist must be an artisan and practise these fruitful virtues—­patient application, conscientious technicality, absorption in work.  When he seated himself at his table Dorsenne was heart and soul in his business.  He closed his door, he opened no letters nor telegrams, and he spent ten hours without taking anything but two eggs and some black coffee, as he did on this particular day, when looking over the essays of his twenty-fifth year with the talent of his thirty-fifth, retouching here a word, rewriting an entire page, dissatisfied here, smiling there at his thought.  The pen flew, carrying with it all the sensibility of the intellectual man who had completely forgotten Madame Steno, Gorka, Maitland, and the calumniated Contessina, until he should awake from his lucid intoxication at nightfall.  As he counted, in arranging the slips, the number of articles prepared, he found there were twelve.

“Like Gorka’s letters,” said he aloud, with a laugh.  He now felt coursing through his veins the lightness which all writers of his kind feel when they have labored on a work they believe good.  “I have earned my evening,” he added, still in a loud voice.  “I must now dress and go to Madame Steno’s.  A good dinner at the doctor’s.  A half-hour’s walk.  The night promises to be divine.  I shall find out if they have news of the Palatine,”—­the name he gave Gorka in his moments of gayety.  “I shall talk in a loud voice of anonymous letters.  If the author of those received by Boleslas is there, I shall be in the best position to discover him; provided that it is not Alba....  Decidedly—­that would be sad!”