“Shall I put on my veil and fetch my parasol?”

“You can join me in the office, whither I am going to talk with Ardea,” replied her mother; adding, “I shall perhaps have some news to tell you in the carriage which will give you pleasure!"....  She had again her bright smile, and she did not mistrust while she resumed her conversation with Peppino that poor Alba, on reentering her chamber, wiped from her pale cheeks two large tears, and that she opened, to re-read it, the infamous anonymous letter received the day before.  She knew by heart all the perfidious phrases.  Must it not have been that the mind which had composed them was blinded by vengeance to such a degree that it had no scruples about laying before the innocent child a denunciation which ran thus: 

“A true friend of Mademoiselle Steno warns her that she is compromised, more than a marriageable young girl should be, in playing, with regard to M. Maitland the role she has already played with regard to M. Goyka.  There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.”

Those words, enigmatical to any one else, but to the Contessina horribly clear, had been, like the letters of which Boleslas had told Dorsenne, cut from a journal and pasted on a sheet of paper.  How had Alba trembled on reading that note for the first time, with an emotion increased by the horror of feeling hovering over her and her mother a hatred so relentless!  Later in the day how much had the words exchanged with Dorsenne comforted her, and how reassured had she been by the Countess’s imperturbability on the entrance of Boleslas Gorka!  Fragile peace, which had vanished when she saw her mother and the husband of her best friend face to face, with traces in their eyes, in their gestures, upon their countenances, of an angry scene!  The thought “Why were they thus!  What had they said?” again occurred to her to sadden her.  Suddenly she crushed in her hand with violence the anonymous letter, which gave a concrete form to her sorrow and her suspicion, and, lighting a taper, she held it to the paper, which the flames soon reduced to ashes.  She ran her fingers through the debris until there was very little left, and then, opening the window, she cast it to the winds.

She looked at her glove after doing this—­her glove, a few moments before, of so delicate a gray, now stained by the smoky dust.  It was symbolical of the stain which the letter, even when destroyed, had left upon her mind.  The gloves, too, inspired her with horror.  She hastily drew them off, and, when she descended to rejoin Madame Steno, it was not any more possible to perceive on those hands, freshly gloved, the traces of that tragical childishness, than it was possible to discern, beneath the large veil which she had tied over her hat, the traces of tears.  She found the mother for whom she was suffering so much, wearing, too, a large sun-hat, but a white one with a white veil, beneath which could be seen her fair hair, her sparkling blue eyes and pink-and-white complexion; her form was enveloped in a gown of a material and cut more youthful than her daughter’s, while, radiant with delight, she said to Peppino Ardea: