Another material proof was soon joined to that moral proof.  Granted the character and the habits of the Countess, since she had not shown Maud’s letter to her daughter there and then, it was because the letter was not fit to be shown.  But she heard on the following day only the description of the duel, related by Maitland to Madame Steno, the savage aggression of Gorka against Dorsenne, the composure of the latter and the issue, relatively harmless, of the two duels.

“You see,” said her mother to her, “I was right in saying that Gorka is mad!....  It seems he has had a fit of insanity since the duel, and that they prevent him from seeing any one....  Can you now comprehend how Maud could blame me for what is hereditary in the Gorka family?”

Such was indeed the story which the Venetian and her friends, Hafner, Ardea, and others, circulated throughout Rome in order to diminish the scandal.  The accusation of madness is very common to women who have goaded to excess man’s passion, and who then wish to avoid all blame for the deeds or words of that man.  In this case, Boleslas’s fury and his two incomprehensible duels, fifteen minutes apart, justified the story.  When it became known in the city that the Palazzetto Doria was strictly closed, that Maud Gorka received no one, and finally that she was taking away her husband in the manner which resembled a flight, no doubt remained of the young man’s wrecked reason.

Two persons profited very handsomely by the gossiping, the origin of which was a mystery.  One was the innkeeper of the ‘Tempo Perso’, whose simple ‘bettola’ became, during those few days, a veritable place of pilgrimage, and who sold a quantity of wine and numbers of fresh eggs.  The other was Dorsenne’s publisher, of whom the Roman booksellers ordered several hundred volumes.

“If I had had that duel in Paris,” said the novelist to Mademoiselle Steno, relating to her the unforeseen result, “I should perhaps have at length known the intoxication of the thirtieth edition.”

It was a few days after the departure of the Gorkas that he jested thus, at a large dinner of twenty-four covers, given at Villa Steno in honor of Peppino Ardea and Fanny Hafner.  Reestablished in the Countess’s favor since his duel, he had again become a frequenter of her house, so much the more assiduous as the increasing melancholy of Alba interested him greatly.  The enigma of the young girl’s character redoubled that interest at each visit in such a degree that, notwithstanding the heat, already beginning, of the dangerous Roman summer, he constantly deferred his return to Paris until the morrow.  What had she guessed in consequence of the encounter, the details of which she had asked of him with an emotion scarcely hidden in her eyes of a blue as clear, as transparent, as impenetrable at the same time, as the water of certain Alpine lakes at the foot of the glaciers.  He thought he was doing right in corroborating the