o..... it is too terrible.... Ah,
Catherine, swear to me that it is not true. Tell me that you no longer
love me, I will submit, I will go away, I will accept all, provided that
you swear to me you do not love that man--swear, swear!"... he added,
grasping her hands with such violence that she uttered a slight
exclamation, and, disengaging herself, said to him:

"Cease; you pain me. You are mad, Gorka; that can be your sole excuse....
I have nothing to swear to you. What I feel, what I think, what I do no
longer concerns you after what I have told you.... Believe what it
pleases you to believe.... But," and the irritation of an enamored woman,
wounded in the man she adores, possessed her, "you shall not speak twice
of one of my friends as you have just spoken. You have deeply offended
me, and I will not pardon you. In place of the friendship I offered you
so honestly, we will have no further connections excepting those of
society. That is what you desired.... Try not to render them impossible
to yourself. Be correct at least in form. Remember you have a wife, I
have a daughter, and that we owe it to them to spare them the knowledge
of this unhappy rupture.... God is my witness, I wished to have it
otherwise."

"My wife! Your daughter!" cried Boleslas with bitterness. "This is indeed
the hour to remember them and to put them between you and my just
vengeance! They never troubled you formerly, the two poor creatures, when
you began to win my love?.... It was convenient for you that they should
be friends! And I lent myself to it!.... I accepted such baseness--that
to-day you might take shelter behind the two innocents!... No, it shall
not be.... you shall not escape me thus. Since it is the only point on
which I can strike you, I will strike you there. I hold you by that
means, do you hear, and I will keep you. Either you dismiss that man, or
I will no longer respect anything. My wife shall know all! Her! So much
the better! For some time I have been stifled by my lies.... Your
daughter, too, shall know all. She shall judge you now as she would judge
you one day."

As he spoke he advanced to her with a manner so cruel that she recoiled.
A few more moments and the man would have carried out his threat. He was
about to strike her, to break objects around him, to call forth a
terrible scandal. She had the presence of mind of an audacity more
courageous still. An electric bell was near at hand. She pressed it,
while Gorka