“You will be pleased with me,” she wrote, “and I shall no longer see in your dear blue eyes which I kiss, as I love them, that gleam of mistrust which troubles me.  I have stopped the correspondence with Gorka.  If you require it, I will even break with Maud, notwithstanding the reason you know of and which will render it difficult for me.  But how can you be jealous yet?....  Is not my frankness with regard to that liaison the surest guarantee that it is ended?  Come, do not be jealous.  Listen to what I know so well, that I felt I loved, and that my life began only on the day when you took me in your arms.  The woman you have awakened in me, no one has known—­”

“She writes well, does she not?” said Lydia, with a gleam of savage triumph in her eyes.  “Do you believe me, now?....  Do you see that we have the same interest to-day, a common affront to avenge?  And we will avenge it....  Do you understand that you can not allow your husband to fight a duel with my brother?  You owe that to me who have given you this weapon by which you hold him....  Threaten him with a divorce.  Fortune is with you.  The law will give you your child.  I repeat, you hold him firmly.  You will prevent the duel, will you not?”

“Ah!  What do you think it matters to me now if they fight or not?” said Maud.  “From the moment he deceived me was I not widowed?  Do not approach me,” she added, looking at Lydia with wild eyes, while a shudder of repulsion shook her entire frame....  “Do not speak to me....  I have as much horror of you as of him....  Let me go, let me leave here....  Even to feel myself in the same room with you fills me with horror....  Ah, what disgrace!”

She retreated to the door, fixing upon her informant a gaze which the other sustained, notwithstanding the scorn in it, with the gloomy pride of defiance.  She went out repeating:  “Ah, what disgrace!” without Lydia having addressed her, so greatly had surprise at the unexpected result of all her attempts paralyzed her.  But the formidable creature lost no time in regret and repentance.  She paused a few moments to think.  Then, crushing in her nervous hand the letter she had shown Maud, at the risk of being discovered by her husband later, she said aloud: 

“Coward!  Lord, what a coward she is!  She loves.  She will pardon.  Will there, then, be no one to aid me?  No one to smite them in their insolent happiness.”  After meditating awhile, her face still more contracted, she placed the letter in the drawer, which she closed again, and half an hour later she summoned a commissionaire, to whom she intrusted a letter, with the order to deliver it immediately, and that letter was addressed to the inspector of police of the district.  She informed him of the intended duel, giving him the names of the two adversaries and of the four seconds.  If she had not been afraid of her brother, she would even that time have signed her name.