“I will not remain with that man another day.  Tomorrow I will leave for England with my son.”

How many, in a similar situation, have uttered such vows, to abjure them when they find themselves face to face with the man who has betrayed them, and whom they love.  Maud was not of that order.  Certainly she loved dearly the seductive Boleslas, wedded against her parents’ will the perfidious one for whom she had sacrificed all, living far from her native land and her family for years, because it pleased him, breathing, living, only for him and for their boy.  But there was within her—­as her long, square chin, her short nose and the strength of her brow revealed—­the force of inflexibility—­which is met with in characters of an absolute uprightness.  Love, with her, could be stifled by disgust, or, rather, she considered it degrading to continue to love one whom she scorned, and, at that moment, it was supreme scorn which reigned in her heart.  She had, in the highest degree, the great virtue which is found wherever there is nobility, and of which the English have made the basis of their moral education—­the religion, the fanaticism of loyalty.  She had always grieved on discovering the wavering nature of Boleslas.  But if she had observed in him, with sorrow, any exaggerations of language, any artificial sentiment, a dangerous suppleness of mind, she had pardoned him those defects with the magnanimity of love, attributing them to a defective training.  Gorka at a very early age had witnessed a stirring family drama—­his mother and his father lived apart, while neither the one nor the other had the exclusive guidance of the child.  How could she find indulgence for the shameful hypocrisy of two years’ standing, for the villainy of that treachery practised at the domestic hearth, for the continued, voluntary disloyalty of every day, every hour?  Though Maud experienced, in the midst of her despair, the sort of calmness which proves a firm and just resolution, when she reentered the Palazzetto Doria—­what a drama had been enacted in her heart since her going out!—­and it was in a voice almost as calm as usual that she asked:  “Is the Count at home?”

What did she experience when the servant, after answering her in the affirmative, added:  “Madame and Mademoiselle Steno, too, are awaiting Madame in the salon.”  At the thought that the woman who had stolen from her her husband was there, the betrayed wife felt her blood boil, to use a common but expressive phrase.  It was very natural that Alba’s mother should call upon her, as was her custom.  It was still more natural for her to come there that day.  For very probably a report of the duel the following day had reached her.  Her presence, however, and at that moment, aroused in Maud a feeling of indignation so impassioned that her first impulse was to enter, to drive out Boleslas’s mistress as one would drive out a servant surprised thieving.  Suddenly the thought of Alba presented