t she was a girl of extraordinary inward energy, who, both
aware of her mother's intrigues and detesting them with an equal hatred,
had planned to precipitate the two men upon each other. For a young girl
the undertaking is great. I will go to the Countess's to-morrow night,
and I will amuse myself by watching Alba, to see. . . If she is innocent,
my deed will be inoffensive. If perchance she is not?"

It is vain to profess to one's own heart a complaisant dandyism of
misanthropy. Such reflections leave behind them a tinge of a remorse,
above all when they are, as these, absolutely whimsical and founded on a
simple paradox of dilettantism. Dorsenne experienced a feeling of shame
when he awoke the following morning, and, thinking of the mystery of the
letters received by Gorka, he recalled the criminal romance he had
constructed around the charming and tender form of his little friend;
happily for his nerves, which were strained by the consideration of the
formidable problem. If it is not some one in the Countess's circle, who
has written those letters? He received, on rising, a voluminous package
of proofs with the inscription: "Urgent." He was preparing to give to the
public a collection of his first articles, under the title of 'Poussiere
d'Idees.'

Dorsenne was a faithful literary worker. Usually, involved titles serve
to hide in a book-stall shop--made goods, and romance writers or dramatic
authors who pride themselves on living to write, and who seek inspiration
elsewhere than in regularity of habits and the work-table, have their
efforts marked from the first by sterility. Obscure or famous, rich or
poor, an artist must be an artisan and practise these fruitful
virtues--patient application, conscientious technicality, absorption in
work. When he seated himself at his table Dorsenne was heart and soul in
his business. He closed his door, he opened no letters nor telegrams, and
he spent ten hours without taking anything but two eggs and some black
coffee, as he did on this particular day, when looking over the essays of
his twenty-fifth year with the talent of his thirty-fifth, retouching
here a word, rewriting an entire page, dissatisfied here, smiling there
at his thought. The pen flew, carrying with it all the sensibility of the
intellectual man who had completely forgotten Madame Steno, Gorka,
Maitland, and the calumniated Contessina, until he should awake from his
lucid intoxication at nightfall. As he counted,