“You did not do that?” cried Madame Gorka, recoiling with horror.  “It was infamous.”

“Yes, I did it,” replied Lydia, with savage pride, “and why not?  It was my right when she took my husband from me.  You have only to return and to look in the place where Gorka keeps his letters.  You will certainly find those I wrote, and others, I assure you, from that woman.  For she has a mania for letter-writing....  Do you believe me now, or will you repeat that I have lied?”

“Never,” returned Maud, with sorrowful indignation upon her lovely, loyal face, “no, never will I descend to such baseness.”

“Well, I will descend for you,” said Lydia.  “What you do not dare to do, I will dare, and you will ask me to aid you in being avenged.  Come,” and, seizing the hand of her stupefied companion, she drew her into Lincoln’s studio, at that moment unoccupied.  She approached one of those Spanish desks, called baygenos, and she touched two small panels, which disclosed, on opening, a secret drawer, in which were a package of letters, which she seized.  Maud Gorka watched her with the same terrified horror with which she would have seen some one killed and robbed.  That honorable soul revolted at the scene in which her mere presence made of her an accomplice.  But at the same time she was a prey, as had been her husband several days before, to that maddening appetite to know the truth, which becomes, in certain forms of doubt, a physical need, as imperious as hunger and thirst, and she listened to Florent’s sister, who continued: 

“Will it be a proof when you have seen the affair written in her own hand?  Yes,” she continued, with cruel irony, “she loves correspondence, our fortunate rival.  Justice must be rendered her that she may make no more avowals.  She writes as she feels.  It seems that the successor was jealous of his predecessor....  See, is this a proof this time?"....  And, after having glanced at the first letters as a person familiar with them, she handed one of those papers to Maud, who had not the courage to avert her eyes.  What she saw written upon that sheet drew from her a cry of anguish.  She had, however, only read ten lines, which proved how much mistaken psychological Dorsenne was in thinking that Maitland was ignorant of the former relations between his mistress and Gorka.  Countess Steno’s grandeur, that which made a courageous woman almost a heroine in her passions, was an absolute sincerity and disgust for the usual pettiness of flirtations.  She would have disdained to deny to a new lover the knowledge of her past, and the semiavowals, so common to women, would have seemed to her a cowardice still worse.  She had not essayed to hide from Maitland what connection she had broken off for him, and it was upon one of those phrases, in which she spoke of it openly, that Madame Gorka’s eyes fell: