“My wife!  Your daughter!” cried Boleslas with bitterness.  “This is indeed the hour to remember them and to put them between you and my just vengeance!  They never troubled you formerly, the two poor creatures, when you began to win my love?....  It was convenient for you that they should be friends!  And I lent myself to it!....  I accepted such baseness—­that to-day you might take shelter behind the two innocents!...  No, it shall not be.... you shall not escape me thus.  Since it is the only point on which I can strike you, I will strike you there.  I hold you by that means, do you hear, and I will keep you.  Either you dismiss that man, or I will no longer respect anything.  My wife shall know all!  Her!  So much the better!  For some time I have been stifled by my lies....  Your daughter, too, shall know all.  She shall judge you now as she would judge you one day.”

As he spoke he advanced to her with a manner so cruel that she recoiled.  A few more moments and the man would have carried out his threat.  He was about to strike her, to break objects around him, to call forth a terrible scandal.  She had the presence of mind of an audacity more courageous still.  An electric bell was near at hand.  She pressed it, while Gorka said to her, with a scornful laugh, “That was the only affront left you to offer me—­to summon your servants to defend you.”

“You are mistaken,” she replied.  “I am not afraid.  I repeat you are mad, and I simply wish to prove it to you by recalling you to the reality of your situation....  Bid Mademoiselle Alba come down,” said she to the footman whom her ring had summoned.  That phrase was the drop of cold water which suddenly broke the furious jet of vapor.  She had found the only means of putting an end to the terrible scene.  For, notwithstanding his menace, she knew that Maud’s husband always recoiled before the young girl, the friend of his wife, of whose delicacy and sensibility he was aware.

Gorka was capable of the most dangerous and most cruel deeds, in an excess of passion augmented by vanity.

He had in him a chivalrous element which would paralyze his frenzy before Alba.  As for the immorality of that combination of defence which involved her daughter in her rupture with a vindictive lover, the Countess did not think of that.  She often said:  “She is my comrade, she is my friend."....  And she thought so.  To lean upon her in that critical moment was only natural to her.  In the tempest of indignation which shook Gorka, the sudden appeal to innocent Alba appeared to him the last degree of cynicism.  During the short space of time which elapsed between the departure of the footman and the arrival of the young girl, he only uttered these words, repeating them as he paced the floor, while his former mistress defied him with her bold gaze: 

“I scorn you, I scorn you; ah, how I scorn you!” Then, when he heard the door open:  “We will resume our conversation, Madame.”