go before I return.  I shall return in fifteen minutes.  Would you like some newspapers?  There are some.  Books?  There are some.  Tobacco?  This box is filled with cigars....  In a quarter of an hour I shall be here and I will have your reply.  I wish it, do you hear?  I wish it"....  And on the threshold with another smile, using that time a term of patois common in Northern Italy and which is only a corruption of ‘schiavo’ or servant:  ‘Ciao Simpaticone.’

“What a woman!” said Peppino Ardea, when the door was closed upon the Countess.  “Yes, what a pity that five years ago in Venice I was not free!  Who knows?  If I had dared, when she took me to my hotel in her gondola.  She was about to leave San Giobbe.  She had not yet accepted Boleslas.  She would have advised—­have directed me.  I should have speculated on the Bourse, as she did, with Hafner’s counsel.  But not in the quality of son-in-law.  I should not have been obliged to marry.  And she would not now have such bad tobacco."....  He was on the point of lighting one of the Virginian cigarettes, a present from Maitland.  He threw it away, making a grimace with his air of a spoiled child, at the risk of scorching the rug which lay upon the marble floor; and he passed into the antechamber in order to fetch his own case in the pocket of the light overcoat he had prudently taken on coming out after eight o’clock.

As he lighted one of the cigarettes in that case, filled with so-called Egyptian tobacco, mixed with opium and saltpetre, which he preferred to the tobacco of the American, he mechanically glanced at the card which the servant had left on going from the room-the card of the unknown visitor for whom Madame Steno had left him.

Ardea read upon it, with astonishment, these words: 

Count Boleslas Gorka.

“She is better than I thought her,” said he, on reentering the deserted office.  “She had no need to bid me not to go.  I think I should wait to see her return from that conversation.”

It was indeed Boleslas whom the Countess found in the salon, which she had chosen as the room the most convenient for the stormy explanation she anticipated.  It was isolated at the end of the hall, and was like a pendant to the terrace.  It formed, with the dining-room, the entire ground-floor, or, rather, the entresol of the house.  Madame Steno’s apartments, as well as the other small salon in which Peppino was, were on the first floor, together with the rooms set apart for the Contessina and her German governess, Fraulein Weber, for the time being on a journey.

The Countess had not been mistaken.  At the first glance exchanged on the preceding day with Gorka, she had divined that he knew all.  She would have suspected it, nevertheless, since Hafner had told her the few words indiscreetly uttered by Dorsenne on the clandestine return of the Pole to Rome.  She had not at that time been mistaken in Boleslas’s intentions, and she had no sooner looked in his face