In her mind were then opened all the windows which Gorka’s perfidity and the Countess’s as well, had sealed with such care.  She saw again the months which followed their return to Rome, and that mode of life so convenient for both.  How often had she walked out with Alba, thus freeing the mother and the husband from the only surveillance annoying to them.  What did the lovers do during those hours?  How many times on returning to the Palazzetto Doria had she found Catherine Steno in the library, seated on the divan beside Boleslas, and she had not mistrusted that the woman had come, during her absence, to embrace that man, to talk to him of love, to give herself to him, without doubt, with the charm of villainy and of danger!  She remembered the episode of their meeting at Bayreuth the previous summer, when she went to England alone with her son, and when her husband undertook to conduct Alba and the Countess from Rome to Bavaria.  They had all met at Nuremberg.  The apartments of the hotel in which the meeting took place became again very vivid in Maud’s memory, with Madame Steno’s bedroom adjoining that of Boleslas’s.

The vision of their caresses, enjoyed in the liberty of the night, while innocent Alba slept near by, and when she rolled away in a carriage with little Luc, drew from her this cry once more:  “Ah, how could he!"....  And immediately that vision awoke in her the remembrance of her husband’s recent return.  She saw him traversing Europe on the receipt of an anonymous letter, to reach that woman’s side twenty-four hours sooner.  What a proof of passion was the frenzy which had not allowed him any longer to bear doubt and absence!....  Did he love the mistress who did not even love him, since she had deceived him with Maitland?  And he was going to fight a duel on her account!....  Jealousy, at that moment, wrung the wife’s heart with a pang still stronger than that of indignation.  She, the strong Englishwoman, so large, so robust, almost masculine in form, mentally compared herself with the supple Italian with her form so round, with her gestures so graceful, her hands so delicate, her feet so dainty; compared herself with the creature of desire, whose every movement implied a secret wave of passion, and she ceased her cry—­“Ah, how could he?”—­at once.  She had a clear knowledge of the power of her rival.

It is indeed a supreme agony for an honorable woman, who loves, to feel herself thus degraded by the mere thought of the intoxication her husband has tasted in arms more beautiful, more caressing, more entwining than hers.  It was, too, a signal for the return of will to the tortured but proud soul.  Disgust possessed her, so violent, so complete, for the atmosphere of falsehood and of sensuality in which Boleslas had lived two years, that she drew herself up, becoming again strong and implacable.  Braving the storm, she turned in the direction of her home, with this resolution as firmly rooted in her mind as if she had deliberated for months and months.