in arranging the slips,
the number of articles prepared, he found there were twelve.

"Like Gorka's letters," said he aloud, with a laugh. He now felt coursing
through his veins the lightness which all writers of his kind feel when
they have labored on a work they believe good. "I have earned my
evening," he added, still in a loud voice. "I must now dress and go to
Madame Steno's. A good dinner at the doctor's. A half-hour's walk. The
night promises to be divine. I shall find out if they have news of the
Palatine,"--the name he gave Gorka in his moments of gayety. "I shall
talk in a loud voice of anonymous letters. If the author of those
received by Boleslas is there, I shall be in the best position to
discover him; provided that it is not Alba.... Decidedly--that would be
sad!"

It was ten o'clock in the evening, when the young man, faithful to his
programme, arrived at the door of the large house on the Rue du Vingt
Septembre occupied by Madame Steno. It was an immense modern structure,
divided into two distinct parts; to the left a revenue building and to
the right a house on the order of those which are to be seen on the
borders of Park Monceau. The Villa Steno, as the inscription in gold upon
the black marble door indicated, told the entire story of the Countess's
fortune--that fortune appraised by rumor, with its habitual exaggeration,
now at twenty, now at thirty, millions. She had in reality two hundred
and fifty thousand francs' income. But as, in 1873, Count Michel Steno,
her husband, died, leaving only debts, a partly ruined palace at Venice
and much property heavily mortgaged, the amount of that income proved the
truth of the title, "superior woman," applied by her friends to Alba's
mother. Her friends likewise added: "She has been the mistress of Hafner,
who has aided her with his financial advice," an atrocious slander which
was so much the more false as it was before ever knowing the Baron that
she had begun to amass her wealth. This is how she managed it:

At the close of 1873, when, as a young widow, living in retirement in the
sumptuous and ruined dwelling on the Grand Canal, she was struggling with
her creditors, one of the largest bankers in Rome came to propose to her
a very advantageous scheme. It dealt with a large piece of land which
belonged to the Steno estate, a piece of land in Rome, in one of the
suburbs, between the Porta Salara and the Porta Pia, a sort of village
which the deceased Car