story of Boleslas Gorka’s madness, which he knew better than any one else to be false.  But was it not the surest means of exempting Madame Steno from connection with the affair?  Why had he seen Alba’s beautiful eyes veiled with a sadness inexplicable, as if he had just given her another blow?  He did not know that since the day on which the word insanity had been uttered before her relative to Maud’s husband, the Contessina was the victim of a reasoning as simple as irrefutable.

“If Boleslas be mad, as they say,” said Alba, “why does Maud, whom I know to be so just and who loves me so dearly, attribute to my mother the responsibility of this duel, to the point of breaking with me thus, and of leaving without a line of explanation?....  No....  There is something else."....  The nature of the “something else” the young girl comprehended, on recalling her mother’s face during the perusal of Maud’s letter.  During the ten days following that scene, she saw constantly before her that face, and the fear imprinted upon those features ordinarily so calm, so haughty!  Ah, poor little soul, indeed, who could not succeed in banishing this fixed idea “My mother is not a good woman.”

Idea!  So much the more terrible, as Alba had no longer the ignorance of a young girl, if she had the innocence.  Accustomed to the conversations, at times very bold, of the Countess’s salon, enlightened by the reading of novels chanced upon, the words lover and mistress had for her a signification of physical intimacy such that it was an almost intolerable torture for her to associate them with the relations of her mother, first toward Gorka, then toward Maitland.  That torture she had undergone during the entire dinner, at the conclusion of which Dorsenne essayed to chat gayly with her.  She sat beside the painter, and the man’s very breath, his gestures, the sound of his voice, his manner of eating and of drinking, the knowledge of his very proximity, had caused her such keen suffering that it was impossible for her to take anything but large glasses of iced water.  Several times during that dinner, prolonged amid the sparkle of magnificent silver and Venetian crystal, amid the perfume of flowers and the gleam of jewels, she had seen Maitland’s eyes fixed upon the Countess with an expression which almost caused her to cry out, so clearly did her instinct divine its impassioned sensuality, and once she thought she saw her mother respond to it.

She felt with appalling clearness that which before she had uncertainly experienced, the immodest character of that mother’s beauty.  With the pearls in her fair hair, with neck and arms bare in a corsage the delicate green tint of which showed to advantage the incomparable splendor of her skin, with her dewy lips, with her voluptuous eyes shaded by their long lashes, the dogaresse looked in the centre of that table like an empress and like a courtesan.  She resembled the Caterina Cornaro, the gallant queen of the island of Cypress, painted by Titian, and whose name she worthily bore.  For years Alba had been so proud of the ray of seduction cast forth by the Countess, so proud of those statuesque arms, of the superb carriage, of the face which defied the passage of time, of the bloom of opulent life the glorious creature displayed.  During that dinner she was almost ashamed of it.