She saw herself plunging into the deep water which would close over her head.  Her suffering would be ended, but Madame Steno?  She saw the coachman growing uneasy over her absence, ringing at the door of Villa Torlonia, the servants in search.  The loosened boat would relate enough.  Would the Countess know that she had killed herself?  Would she know the cause of that desperate end?  The terrible face of Lydia Maitland appeared to the young girl.  She comprehended that the woman hated her enemy too much not to enlighten her with regard to the circumstances which had preceded that suicide.  The cry so simple and of a significance so terrible:  “You did it purposely!” returned to Alba’s memory.  She saw her mother learning that her daughter had seen all.  She had loved her so much, that mother, she loved her so dearly still!

Then, as a third violent chill shook her from head to foot, Alba began to think of another mode, and one as sure, of death without any one in the world being able to suspect that it was voluntary.  She recalled the fact that she was in one of the most dreaded corners of the Roman Campagna; that she had known persons carried off in a few days by the pernicious fevers contracted in similar places, at that hour and in that season, notably one of her friends, one of the Bonapartes living in Rome, who came thither to hunt when overheated.  If she were to try to catch that same disease?....  And she took up the oars.  When she felt her brow moist with the second effort, she opened her bodice and her chemise, she exposed her neck, her breast, her throat, and she lay down in the boat, allowing the damp air to envelop, to caress, to chill her, inviting the entrance into her blood of the fatal germs.  How long did she remain thus, half-unconscious, in the atmosphere more and more laden with miasma in proportion as the sun sank?  A cry made her rise and again take up the oars.  It was the coachman, who, not seeing her return, had descended from the box and was hailing the boat at all hazards.  When she stepped upon the bank and when he saw her so pale, the man, who had been in the Countess’s service for years, could not help saying to her, with the familiarity of an Italian servant: 

“You have taken cold, Mademoiselle, and this place is so dangerous.”

“Indeed,” she replied, “I have had a chill.  It will be nothing.  Let us return quickly.  Above all, do not say that I was in the boat.  You will cause me to be scolded.”

CHAPTER XII

EPILOGUE

“And it was directly after that conversation that the poor child left for the lake, where she caught the pernicious fever?” asked Montfanon.