Maud, too, would know all.  There are conversations and, above all, adieux which a man who is about to fight a duel always likes to avoid.  Although he forced a smile, he no longer doubted.  His wife’s evident agitation could not be explained by any other cause.  Could he divine that she had learned not only of the duel, but, too, of an intrigue that day ended and of which she had known nothing for two years?  As she was silent, and as that silence embarrassed him, he tried, in order to keep him in countenance, to take her hand and kiss it, as was his custom.  She repelled him with a look which he had never seen upon her face and said to him, handing him the sheet of paper lying before her: 

“Do you wish to read this note before I send it to Madame Steno, who is in the salon with her daughter?”

Boleslas took the letter.  He read the terrible lines, and he became livid.  His agitation was so great that he returned the paper to his wife without replying, without attempting to prevent, as was his duty, the insult offered to his former mistress, whom he still loved to the point of risking his life for her.  That man, so brave and so yielding at once, was overwhelmed by one of those surprises which put to flight all the powers of the mind, and he watched Maud slip the note into an envelope, write the address and ring.  He heard her say to the servant: 

“You will take this note to Countess Steno and you will excuse me to the ladies....  I feel too indisposed to receive any one.  If they insist, you will reply that I have forbidden you to admit any one.  You understand—­any one.”

The man took the note.  He left the room and he had no doubt fulfilled his errand while the husband and wife stood there, face to face, neither of them breaking the formidable silence.  They felt that the hour was a solemn one.

Never, since the day on which Cardinal Manning had united their destinies in the chapel of Ardrahan Castle, had they been engaged in a crisis so tragical.  Such moments lay bare the very depths of the character.  Courageous and noble, Maud did not think of weighing her words.  She did not try to feed her jealousy, nor to accentuate the cruelty of the cause of the insult which she had the right to launch at the man toward whom that very morning she had been so confiding, so tender.  The baseness and the cruelty were to remain forever unknown to the woman who no longer hesitated as to the bold resolution she had made.  No.  That which she expected of the man whom she had loved so dearly, of whom she had entertained so exalted an opinion, whom she had just seen fall so low, was a cry of truth, an avowal in which she would find the throb of a last remnant of honor.  If he were silent it was not because he was preparing a denial.  The tenor of Maud’s letter left no doubt as to the nature of the proofs she had in her hand, which she had there no doubt.  How?  He did not ask himself that question, governed as