“I should have gone to work that way at first,” said she to herself, when the door of the small salon closed behind the messenger to whom she had given her order personally.  “The police know how to prevent them from fighting, even if I do not succeed with Florent....  As for him?".... and she looked at a portrait of Maitland upon the desk at which she had just been writing.  “Were I to tell him what is taking place....  No, I will ask nothing of him....  I hate him too much."....  And she concluded with a fierce smile, which disclosed her teeth at the corners of her mouth: 

“It is all the same.  It is necessary that Maud Gorka work with me against her.  There is some one whom she will not pardon, and that is....  Madame Steno.”  And, in spite of her uneasiness, the wicked woman trembled with delight at the thought of her work.

CHAPTER VIII

ON THE GROUND

When Maud Gorka left the house on the Rue Leopardi she walked on at first rapidly, blindly, without seeing, without hearing anything, like a wounded animal which runs through the thicket to escape danger, to escape its wounds, to escape itself.  It was a little more than half-past three o’clock when the unhappy woman hastened from the studio, unable to bear near her the presence of Lydia Maitland, of that sinister worker of vengeance who had so cruelly revealed to her, with such indisputable proofs, the atrocious affair, the long, the infamous, the inexpiable treason.

It was almost six o’clock before Maud Gorka really regained consciousness.  A very common occurrence aroused her from the somnambulism of suffering in which she had wandered for two hours.  The storm which had threatened since noon at length broke.  Maud, who had scarcely heeded the first large drops, was forced to seek shelter when the clouds suddenly burst, and she took refuge at the right extremity of the colonnade of St. Peter’s.  How had she gone that far?  She did not know herself precisely.  She remembered vaguely that she had wandered through a labyrinth of small streets, had crossed the Tiber—­no doubt by the Garibaldi bridge—­had passed through a large garden—­doubtless the Janicule, since she had walked along a portion of the ramparts.  She had left the city by the Porte de Saint-Pancrace, to follow by that of Cavallegieri the sinuous line of the Urban walls.

That corner of Rome, with a view of the pines of the Villa Pamfili on one side, and on the other the back part of the Vatican, serves as a promenade during the winter for the few cardinals who go in search of the afternoon sun, certain there of meeting only a few strangers.  In the month of May it is a desert, scorched by the sun, which glows upon the brick, discolored by two centuries of that implacable heat which caresses the scales of the green and gray lizards about to crawl between the bees of Pope Urbain VIII’s escutcheon of the Barberini family.  Madame Gorka’s