“I have not let it go this evening,” said he.  “The worst is, that Gorka will not sleep, and then, his hand!”

Only the first of those two prognostics was to be verified.  Returning home at that late hour, Boleslas did not even retire.  He employed the remainder of the night in writing a long letter to his wife, one to his son, to be given to him on his eighteenth birthday, all in case of an accident.  Then he examined his papers and he came upon the package of letters he had received from Madame Steno.  Merely to reread a few of them, and to glance at the portraits of that faithless mistress again, heightened his anger to such a degree that he enclosed the whole in a large envelope, which he addressed to Lincoln Maitland.  He had no sooner sealed it than he shrugged his shoulders, saying:  “Of what use?” He raised the piece of material which stopped up the chimney, and, placing the envelope on the fire-dogs, he set it on fire.  He shook with the tongs the remains of that which had been the most ardent, the most complete passion of his life, and he relighted the flames under the pieces of paper still intact.  The unreasonable employment of a night which might be his last had scarcely paled his face.  But his friends, who knew him well, started on seeing him with that impassively sinister countenance when he alighted from his phaeton, at about eight o’clock, at the inn selected for the meeting.  He had ordered the carriage the day before to allay his wife’s suspicions by the pretense of taking one of his usual morning drives.  In his mental confusion he had forgotten to give a counter order, and that accident caused him to escape the two policemen charged by the questorship to watch the Palazzetto Doria, on Lydia Maitland’s denunciation.  The hired victoria, which those agents took, soon lost track of the swift English horses, driven as a man of his character and of his mental condition could drive.

The precaution of Chapron’s sister was, therefore, baffled in that direction, and she succeeded no better with regard to her brother, who, to avoid all explanation with Lincoln, had gone, under the pretext of a visit to the country, to dine and sleep at the hotel.  It was there that Montfanon and Dorsenne met him to conduct him to the rendezvous in the classical landau.  Hardly had they reached the eminence of the circus of Maxence, on the Appian Way, when they were passed by Boleslas’s phaeton.

“You can rest very easy,” said Montfanon to Florent.  “How can one aim correctly when one tires one’s arm in that way?”

That had been the only allusion to the duel made between the three men during the journey, which had taken about an hour.  Florent talked as he usually did, asking all sorts of questions which attested his care for minute information—­the most of which might be utilized by his brother-in-law-and the Marquis had replied by evoking, with his habitual erudition, several of the souvenirs which peopled that vast country, strewn with tombs, aqueducts, ruined villas, with the line of the Monts Albains enclosing them beyond.