"Will it be a proof when you have seen the affair written in her own
hand? Yes," she continued, with cruel irony, "she loves correspondence,
our fortunate rival. Justice must be rendered her that she may make no
more avowals. She writes as she feels. It seems that the successor was
jealous of his predecessor.... See, is this a proof this time?".... And,
after having glanced at the first letters as a person familiar with them,
she handed one of those papers to Maud, who had not the courage to avert
her eyes. What she saw written upon that sheet drew from her a cry of
anguish. She had, however, only read ten lines, which proved how much
mistaken psychological Dorsenne was in thinking that Maitland was
ignorant of the former relations between his mistress and Gorka. Countess
Steno's grandeur, that which made a courageous woman almost a heroine in
her passions, was an absolute sincerity and disgust for the usual
pettiness of flirtations. She would have disdained to deny to a new lover
the knowledge of her past, and the semiavowals, so common to women, would
have seemed to her a cowardice still worse. She had not essayed to hide
from Maitland what connection she had broken off for him, and it was upon
one of those phrases, in which she spoke of it openly, that Madame
Gorka's eyes fell:

"You will be pleased with me," she wrote, "and I shall no longer see in
your dear blue eyes which I kiss, as I love them, that gleam of mistrust
which troubles me. I have stopped the correspondence with Gorka. If you
require it, I will even break with Maud, notwithstanding the reason you
know of and which will render it difficult for me. But how can you be
jealous yet?.... Is not my frankness with regard to that liaison the
surest guarantee that it is ended? Come, do not be jealous. Listen to
what I know so well, that I felt I loved, and that my life began only on
the day when you took me in your arms. The woman you have awakened in me,
no one has known--"

"She writes well, does she not?" said Lydia, with a gleam of savage
triumph in her eyes. "Do you believe me, now?.... Do you see that we have
the same interest to-day, a common affront to avenge? And we will avenge
it.... Do you understand that you can not allow your husband to fight a
duel with my brother? You owe that to me who have given you this weapon
by which you hold him.... Threaten him with a divorce. Fortune is with
you. The law will give you your child. I repeat, you hold him f