furnished the formidable woman with the means of obtaining the place of espionage in all security.  Situated on the second floor, the studio occupied most of the depth of the house.  The wall, which separated it from the side of the apartments, ended in a partition formed of colored glass, through which it was impossible to see.  That glass lighted a dark corridor adjoining the linen-room.  Lydia employed several hours of several nights in cutting with a diamond a hole, the size of a fifty centime-piece, in one of those unpolished squares.

Her preparations had been completed several days when, notwithstanding her absence of scruple in the satiating of her hatred, she still hesitated to employ that mode of vengeance, so much atrocious cruelty was there in causing a daughter to spy upon her mother.  It was Alba herself who kindled the last spark of humanity with which that dark conscience was lighted up, and that by the most innocent of conversations.  It was the very evening of the afternoon on which she had exchanged that sad adieu with Fanny Hafner.  She was more unnerved than usual, and she was conversing with Dorsenne in that corner of the long hall.  They did not heed the fact that Lydia drew near them, by a simple change of seat which permitted her, while herself conversing with some guest, to lend an ear to the words uttered by the Contessina.

It was Florent who was the subject of their conversation, and she said to Dorsenne, who was praising him: 

“What would you have?  It is true I almost feel repulsion toward him.  He is to me like a being of another species.  His friendship for his brother-in-law?  Yes.  It is very beautiful, very touching; but it does not touch me.  It is a devotion which is not human.  It is too instinctive and too blind.  Indeed, I know that I am wrong.  There is that prejudice of race which I can never entirely overcome.”

Dorsenne touched her fingers at that moment, under the pretext of taking from her her fan, in reality to warn her, and he said, in a very low voice that time: 

“Let us go a little farther on.  Lydia Maitland is too near.”

He fancied he surprised a start on the part of Florent’s sister, at whom he accidentally glanced, while his too-sensible interlocutor no longer watched her!  But as the pretty, clear laugh of Lydia rang out at the same moment, imprudent Alba replied: 

“Fortunately, she has heard nothing.  And see how one can speak of trouble without mistrusting it....  I have just been wicked,” she continued, “for it is not their fault, neither Florent’s nor hers, if there is a little negro blood in their veins, so much the more so as it is connected by the blood of a hero, and they are both perfectly educated, and what is better, perfectly good, and then I know very well that if there is a grand thought in this age it is to have proclaimed that truly all men are brothers.”

She had spoken in a lower voice, but too late.  Moreover, even if Florent’s sister could have heard those words, they would not have sufficed to heal the wound which the first ones had made in the most sensitive part of her ‘amour propre’!