“I will remain here to-night,” resumed Maud, without heeding that reply, “for the last time.  To-morrow evening I shall leave for England.”

“You are free,” said he, with a bow.

“And I shall take my son with me,” she added.

“Our son!” he replied, with the composure of a man overcome by an access of tenderness and who controls himself.  “That?  No.  I forbid it.”

“You forbid it?” said she.  “Very well, we will appeal it.  I knew that you would force me,” she continued, haughtily, in her turn, “to have recourse to the law....  But I shall not recoil before anything.  In betraying me as you have done, you have also betrayed our child.  I will not leave him to you.  You are not worthy of him.”

“Listen, Maud,” said Boleslas, sadly, after a pause, “remember that it is perhaps the last time we shall meet....  To-morrow, if I am killed, you shall do as you like....  If I live, I promise to consent to any arrangement that will be just....  What I ask of you is—­and I have the right, notwithstanding my faults—­in the name of our early years of wedded life, in the name of that son himself, to leave me in a different way, to have a feeling, I don’t say of pardon, but of pity.”

“Did you have it for me,” she replied, “when you were following your passion by way of my heart?  No!"....  And she walked before him in order to reach the door, fixing upon him eyes so haughty that he involuntarily lowered his.  “You have no longer a wife and I have no longer a husband....  I am no Madame Maitland; I do not avenge myself by means of anonymous letters nor by denunciation....  But to pardon you?....  Never, do you hear, never!”

With those words she left the room, with those words into which she put all the indomitable energy of her character....  Boleslas did not essay to detain her.  When, an hour after that horrible conversation, his valet came to inform him that dinner was served, the wretched man was still in the same place, his elbow on the mantelpiece and his forehead in his hand.  He knew Maud too well to hope that she would change her determination, and there was in him, in spite of his faults, his folly and his complications, too much of the real gentleman to employ means of violence and to detain her forcibly, when he had erred so gravely.  So she went thus.  If, just before, he had exaggerated the expression of his feelings in saying, in thinking rather, that he had never ceased loving her, it was true that amid all his errors he had maintained for her an affection composed particularly of gratitude, remorse, esteem and, it must be said, of selfishness.