by saying:

"Shall I put on my veil and fetch my parasol?"

"You can join me in the office, whither I am going to talk with Ardea,"
replied her mother; adding, "I shall perhaps have some news to tell you
in the carriage which will give you pleasure!".... She had again her
bright smile, and she did not mistrust while she resumed her conversation
with Peppino that poor Alba, on reentering her chamber, wiped from her
pale cheeks two large tears, and that she opened, to re-read it, the
infamous anonymous letter received the day before. She knew by heart all
the perfidious phrases. Must it not have been that the mind which had
composed them was blinded by vengeance to such a degree that it had no
scruples about laying before the innocent child a denunciation which ran
thus:

"A true friend of Mademoiselle Steno warns her that she is
compromised, more than a marriageable young girl should be, in
playing, with regard to M. Maitland the role she has already played
with regard to M. Goyka. There are conditions of blindness so
voluntary that they become complicity."

Those words, enigmatical to any one else, but to the Contessina horribly
clear, had been, like the letters of which Boleslas had told Dorsenne,
cut from a journal and pasted on a sheet of paper. How had Alba trembled
on reading that note for the first time, with an emotion increased by the
horror of feeling hovering over her and her mother a hatred so
relentless! Later in the day how much had the words exchanged with
Dorsenne comforted her, and how reassured had she been by the Countess's
imperturbability on the entrance of Boleslas Gorka! Fragile peace, which
had vanished when she saw her mother and the husband of her best friend
face to face, with traces in their eyes, in their gestures, upon their
countenances, of an angry scene! The thought "Why were they thus! What
had they said?" again occurred to her to sadden her. Suddenly she crushed
in her hand with violence the anonymous letter, which gave a concrete
form to her sorrow and her suspicion, and, lighting a taper, she held it
to the paper, which the flames soon reduced to ashes. She ran her fingers
through the debris until there was very little left, and then, opening
the window, she cast it to the winds.

She looked at her glove after doing this--her glove, a few moments
before, of so delicate a gray, now stained by the smoky dust. It was
symbolical of the stain which the letter, even whe