Boleslas, with a
sarcasm which distorted his handsome face into a smile of atrocious
hatred. The good-nature displayed by her cut him to the heart, and he
continued, already less self-possessed: "It is indeed an explanation
which I think I have the right to ask of you, and which I have come to
claim."

"To claim, my dear?" said the Countess, looking him fixedly in the face
without lowering her proud eyes, in which those imperative words had
kindled a flame.

If she had been admirable the preceding evening in facing as she had done
the return of her discarded lover, on coming direct from the tete-a-tete
with her new one, perhaps, at that moment, she was doubly so, when she
did not have her group of intimate friends to support her. She was not
sure that the madman who confronted her was not armed, and she believed
him perfectly capable of killing her, while she could not defend herself.
But a part had to be played sooner or later, and she played it without
flinching. She had not spoken an untruth in saying to Peppino Ardea: "I
know only one way: to see one's aim and to march directly to it." She
wanted a definitive rupture with Boleslas. Why should she hesitate as to
the means?

She was silent, seeking for words. He continued:

"Will you permit me to go back three months, although that is, it seems,
a long space of time for a woman's memory? I do not know whether you
recall our last meeting? Pardon, I meant to say the last but one, since
we met last night. Do you concede that the manner in which we parted then
did not presage the manner in which we met?"

"I concede it," said the Countess, with a gleam of angry pride in her
eyes, "although I do not very much like your style of expression. It is
the second time you have addressed me as an accuser, and if you assume
that attitude it will be useless to continue."

"Catherine!".... That cry of the young man, whose anger was increasing,
decided her whom he thus addressed to precipitate the issue of a
conversation in which each reply was to be a fresh burst of rancor.

"Well?" she inquired, crossing her arms in a manner so imperious that he
paused in his menace, and she continued: "Listen, Boleslas, we have
talked ten minutes without saying anything, because neither of us has the
courage to put the question such as we know and feel it to be. Instead of
writing to me, as you did, letters which rendered replies impossible to
me; instead of returning to Rome and hiding you