ored, as if it
were the product of a painful effort. She felt all her blood rush back
upon her heart. Madly she tore the letter open, and read with the haste
of a person anxious to drain the cup of bitterness at a single draught,
skipping a line here and a line there, taking in only the significant
words.

"My mother very ill.... I must go home for a day or two ... my duty as a
son ... we'll soon meet again." And then all the cowardly, conventional
excuses that chivalry has created to soften the harshness of
desertion--the promise to join her again as soon as possible; passionate
protestations that she was the only woman in the world he loved.

Her first thought was to go back to Alcira at once, walk there if
necessary, find the scamp somewhere, throw the letter into his face,
beat him, claw him to pieces!

"Ah, the wretch! The infamous, cowardly, unspeakable wretch!" she cried.

Beppa had found a candle. She lighted it. And there her mistress
was--staggering, deathly pale, her eyes wide open, her lips white with
anguish! Leonora began to walk up and down the apartment, taut and
strained, as if her feet were not moving at all, as if she were being
thrust about by an invisible hand.

"Beppa," she groaned finally, "he has gone. He is deserting me."

The maid did not care about the desertion particularly. She had been
through that before. She was thinking about Leonora, waiting for the
impending crisis, studying the anguished countenance of her mistress
with her own placid, bovine eyes.

"The wretch!" Leonora hissed, pacing back and forth in the chamber.
"What a fool, what a complete, unconscionable fool I have been! Giving
myself to that man, believing in that man, trusting that man, giving up
my peace of mind, the last relative I had in the world for that man!...
And why would he not let me go off alone? He made me dream of an eternal
springtime of love, and now he deserts me.... He has tricked me ... he
is laughing at me ... and I can not hate him. Why did he insist on
rousing me when I was there alone, quite peaceful, forgetting
everything, sunk in a placid indulgent calm!... The cool fraud that he
was!... But what do I care, after all?... It's all over. Come Beppa,
cheer up! Hah-hah! Come, Beppa! We're off! We're off! We're going to
sing again! Off over the whole globe. Good-bye to this rat-hole forever!
I'm through educating children! Now for life again! And we'll drain them
dry, the brutes! Kick them about l