me to
you? Did Madame Maitland write those anonymous letters?"

"She desired to be avenged," replied Maud, adding: "She has the right,
since your mistress robbed her of her husband."

"Well, I, too, will be avenged!" exclaimed the young man. "I will kill
that husband for her, after I have killed her brother. I will kill them
both, one after the other.".... His mobile countenance, which had just
expressed the most impassioned of supplications, now expressed only
hatred and rage, and the same change took place in his immoderate
sensibility. "Of what use is it to try to settle matters?" he continued.
"I see only too well all is ended between us. Your pride and your rancor
are stronger than your love. If it had been otherwise, you would have
begged me not to fight, and you would only have reproached me, as you
have the right to do, I do not deny.... But from the moment that you no
longer love me, woe to him whom I find in my path! Woe to Madame Maitland
and to those she loves!"

"This time at least you are sincere," replied Maud, with renewed
bitterness. "Do you think I have not suffered sufficient humiliation?
Would you like me to supplicate you not to fight for that creature? And
do you not feel the supreme outrage which that encounter is to me?
Moreover," she continued with tragical solemnity, "I did not summon you
to have with you a conversation as sad as it is useless, but to tell you
my resolution.... I hope that you will not oblige me to resort for its
execution to the means which the law puts in my power?"

"I don't deserve to be spoken to thus," said Boleslas, haughtily.

"I will remain here to-night," resumed Maud, without heeding that reply,
"for the last time. To-morrow evening I shall leave for England."

"You are free," said he, with a bow.

"And I shall take my son with me," she added.

"Our son!" he replied, with the composure of a man overcome by an access
of tenderness and who controls himself. "That? No. I forbid it."

"You forbid it?" said she. "Very well, we will appeal it. I knew that you
would force me," she continued, haughtily, in her turn, "to have recourse
to the law.... But I shall not recoil before anything. In betraying me as
you have done, you have also betrayed our child. I will not leave him to
you. You are not worthy of him."

"Listen, Maud," said Boleslas, sadly, after a pause, "remember that it is
perhaps the last time we shall meet.... To-morrow, if I am killed, you
shall do