exchanged between the two Roman imitators of Casal are intolerable to the hearer.  One desires to be alone to feed upon, at least in peace, the bitter food, the exasperating and inefficacious rancor against people and against fate, with which Gorka at that moment felt his heart to be so full.  The presence of his former mistress at the races, and on that afternoon, wounded him more cruelly than the rest.  He did not doubt that she knew through Maitland, himself, certainly informed by Chapron, of the two duels and of his injury.  It was on her account that he had fought, and that very day she appeared in public, smiling, coquetting, as if two years of passion had not united their lives, as if he were to her merely a social acquaintance, a guest at her dinners and her soirees.  He knew her habits so well, and how eagerly, when she loved, she drank in the presence of him she loved.  No doubt she had an appointment on the race-course with Maitland, as she had formerly had with him, and the painter had gone thither when he should have cared for his courageous, his noble brother-in-law, whom he had allowed to fight for him!  What a worthy lover the selfish and brutal American was of that vile creature!  The image of the happy couple tortured Boleslas with the bitterest jealousy intermingled with disgust, and, by contrast, he thought of his own wife, the proud and tender Maud whom he had lost.

He pictured to himself other illnesses when he had seen that beautiful nurse by his bedside.  He saw again the true glance with which that wife, so shamefully betrayed, looked at him, the movements of her loyal hands, which yielded to no one the care of waiting upon him.  To-day she had allowed him to go to a duel without seeing him.  He had returned.  She had not even inquired as to his wound.  The doctor had dressed it without her presence, and all that he knew of her was what he learned from their child.  For he sent for Luc.  He explained to him his broken arm, as had been agreed upon with his friends, by a fall on the staircase, and little Luc replied: 

“When will you join us, then?  Mamma says we leave for England this evening or in the morning.  All the trunks are almost ready.”

That evening or to-morrow?  So Maud was going to execute her threat.  She was going away forever, and without an explanation.  He could not even plead his cause once more to the woman who certainly would not respond to another appeal, since she had found, in her outraged pride, the strength to be severe, when he was in danger of death.  In the face of that evidence of the desertion of all connected with him, Boleslas suffered one of those accesses of discouragement, deep, absolute, irremediable, in which one longs to sleep forever.  He asked himself:  “Were I to try one more step?” and he replied:  “She will not!” when his valet entered with word that the Countess desired to speak with him.  His agitation was so extreme that, for a second, he fancied it was with regard to Madame Steno, and he was almost afraid to see his wife enter.