The two persons of whom her friendship, now impotent, had thought, were, for various reasons, the two fatal instruments of the fate of the “poor little soul,” and the vague remorse which Maud herself felt with regard to the terrible note sent to Madame Steno in the presence of the young girl, was only too true.  When the servant had given that letter to the Countess, saying that Madame Gorka excused herself on account of indisposition, Alba Steno’s first impulse had been to enter her friend’s room.

“I will go to embrace her and to see if she has need of anything,” she said.

“Madame has forbidden any one to enter her room,” replied the footman, with embarrassment, and, at the same moment, Madame Steno, who had just opened the note, said, in a voice which struck the young girl by its change: 

“Let us go; I do not feel well, either.”

The woman, so haughty, so accustomed to bend all to her will, was indeed trembling in a very pitiful manner beneath the insult of those phrases which drove her, Caterina Steno, away with such ignominy.  She paled to the roots of her fair hair, her face was distorted, and for the first and last time Alba saw her form tremble.  It was only for a few moments.  At the foot of the staircase energy gained the mastery in that courageous character, created for the shock of strong emotions and for instantaneous action.  But rapid as had been that passage, it had sufficed to disconcert the young girl.  For not a moment did she doubt that the note was the cause of that extraordinary metamorphosis in the Countess’s aspect and attitude.  The fact that Maud would not receive her, her friend, in her room was not less strange.  What was happening?  What did the letter contain?  What were they hiding from her?  If she had, the day before, felt the “needle in the heart” only on divining a scene of violent explanation between her mother and Boleslas Gorka, how would she have been agonized to ascertain the state into which the few lines of Boleslas’s wife had cast that mother!  The anonymous denunciation recurred to her, and with it all the suspicion she had in vain rejected.  The mother was unaware that for months there was taking place in her daughter a moral drama of which that scene formed a decisive episode, she was too shrewd not to understand that her emotion had been very imprudent, and that she must explain it.  Moreover, the rupture with Maud was irreparable, and it was necessary that Alba should be included in it.

The mother, at once so guilty and so loving, so blind and so considerate, had no sooner foreseen the necessity than her decision was made, and a false explanation invented: 

“Guess what Maud has just written me?” said she, brusquely, to her daughter, when they were seated side by side in their carriage.  God, what balm the simple phrase introduced into Alba’s heart!  Her mother was about to show her the note!  Her joy was short-lived!  The note remained where the Countess had slipped it, after having nervously folded it, in the opening in her glove.  And she continued:  “She accuses me of being the cause of a duel between her husband and Florent Chapron, and she quarrels with me by letter, without seeing me, without speaking to me!”