“I am very happy to find you in such a mind,” replied Boleslas, with a sarcasm which distorted his handsome face into a smile of atrocious hatred.  The good-nature displayed by her cut him to the heart, and he continued, already less self-possessed:  “It is indeed an explanation which I think I have the right to ask of you, and which I have come to claim.”

“To claim, my dear?” said the Countess, looking him fixedly in the face without lowering her proud eyes, in which those imperative words had kindled a flame.

If she had been admirable the preceding evening in facing as she had done the return of her discarded lover, on coming direct from the tete-a-tete with her new one, perhaps, at that moment, she was doubly so, when she did not have her group of intimate friends to support her.  She was not sure that the madman who confronted her was not armed, and she believed him perfectly capable of killing her, while she could not defend herself.  But a part had to be played sooner or later, and she played it without flinching.  She had not spoken an untruth in saying to Peppino Ardea:  “I know only one way:  to see one’s aim and to march directly to it.”  She wanted a definitive rupture with Boleslas.  Why should she hesitate as to the means?

She was silent, seeking for words.  He continued: 

“Will you permit me to go back three months, although that is, it seems, a long space of time for a woman’s memory?  I do not know whether you recall our last meeting?  Pardon, I meant to say the last but one, since we met last night.  Do you concede that the manner in which we parted then did not presage the manner in which we met?”

“I concede it,” said the Countess, with a gleam of angry pride in her eyes, “although I do not very much like your style of expression.  It is the second time you have addressed me as an accuser, and if you assume that attitude it will be useless to continue.”

“Catherine!"....  That cry of the young man, whose anger was increasing, decided her whom he thus addressed to precipitate the issue of a conversation in which each reply was to be a fresh burst of rancor.

“Well?” she inquired, crossing her arms in a manner so imperious that he paused in his menace, and she continued:  “Listen, Boleslas, we have talked ten minutes without saying anything, because neither of us has the courage to put the question such as we know and feel it to be.  Instead of writing to me, as you did, letters which rendered replies impossible to me; instead of returning to Rome and hiding yourself like a malefactor; instead of coming to my home last night with that threatening face; instead of approaching me this morning with the solemnity of a judge, why did you not question me simply, frankly, as one who knows that I have loved him very, very much?....  Having been lovers, is that a reason for detesting each other when we cease those relations?”

“‘When we cease those relations!’” replied Gorka.  “So you no longer love me?  Ah, I knew it; I guessed it after the first week of that fatal absence!  But to think that you should tell it to me some day like that, in that calm voice which is a horrible blasphemy for our entire past.  No, I do not believe it.  I do not yet believe it.  Ah, it is too infamous.”