he had penned an adieu so tender in case he should be killed—­the Lydia who would have terrified him had he seen her thus, with passion distorting the face which was considered insignificant!  She herself, the audacious spy, trembled as if she would fall, her eyes dilated, her bosom heaved, her teeth chattered, so greatly was she unnerved by what she had discovered, by the terrible consequences which she had brought about.

Had she not written the anonymous letters to Gorka, denouncing to him the intrigue between Maitland and Madame Steno?  Was it not she who had chosen, the better to poison those terrible letters, phrases the most likely to strike the betrayed lover in the most sensitive part of his ‘amour propre’?  Was it not she who had hastened the return of the jealous man with the certain hope of drawing thus a tragical vengeance upon the hated heads of her husband and the Venetian?  That vengeance, indeed, had broken.  But upon whom?  Upon the only person Lydia loved in the world, upon the brother whom she saw endangered through her fault; and that thought was to her so overwhelming that she sank into the armchair in which Florent had been seated fifteen minutes before, repeating, with an accent of despair:  “He is going to fight a duel.  He is going to fight instead of the other!”

All the moral history of that obscure and violent soul was summed up in the cry in which passionate anxiety for her brother was coupled with a fierce hatred of her husband.  That hatred was the result of a youth and a childhood without the story of which a duplicity so criminal in a being so young would be unintelligible.  That youth and that childhood had presaged what Lydia would one day be.  But who was there to train the nature in which the heredity of an oppressed race manifested itself, as has been already remarked, by the two most detestable characteristics —­hypocrisy and perfidy?  Who, moreover, observes in children the truth, as much neglected in practise as it is common in theory, that the defects of the tenth year become vices in the thirtieth?  When quite a child Lydia invented falsehoods as naturally as her brother spoke the truth....  Whosoever observed her would have perceived that those lies were all told to paint herself in a favorable light.  The germ, too, of another defect was springing up within her—­a jealousy instinctive, irrational, almost wicked.  She could not see a new plaything in Florent’s hands without sulking immediately.  She could not bear to see her brother embrace her father without casting herself between them, nor could she see him amuse himself with other comrades.