ee if she has need of anything," she
said.

"Madame has forbidden any one to enter her room," replied the footman,
with embarrassment, and, at the same moment, Madame Steno, who had just
opened the note, said, in a voice which struck the young girl by its
change:

"Let us go; I do not feel well, either."

The woman, so haughty, so accustomed to bend all to her will, was indeed
trembling in a very pitiful manner beneath the insult of those phrases
which drove her, Caterina Steno, away with such ignominy. She paled to
the roots of her fair hair, her face was distorted, and for the first and
last time Alba saw her form tremble. It was only for a few moments. At
the foot of the staircase energy gained the mastery in that courageous
character, created for the shock of strong emotions and for instantaneous
action. But rapid as had been that passage, it had sufficed to disconcert
the young girl. For not a moment did she doubt that the note was the
cause of that extraordinary metamorphosis in the Countess's aspect and
attitude. The fact that Maud would not receive her, her friend, in her
room was not less strange. What was happening? What did the letter
contain? What were they hiding from her? If she had, the day before, felt
the "needle in the heart" only on divining a scene of violent explanation
between her mother and Boleslas Gorka, how would she have been agonized
to ascertain the state into which the few lines of Boleslas's wife had
cast that mother! The anonymous denunciation recurred to her, and with it
all the suspicion she had in vain rejected. The mother was unaware that
for months there was taking place in her daughter a moral drama of which
that scene formed a decisive episode, she was too shrewd not to
understand that her emotion had been very imprudent, and that she must
explain it. Moreover, the rupture with Maud was irreparable, and it was
necessary that Alba should be included in it.

The mother, at once so guilty and so loving, so blind and so considerate,
had no sooner foreseen the necessity than her decision was made, and a
false explanation invented:

"Guess what Maud has just written me?" said she, brusquely, to her
daughter, when they were seated side by side in their carriage. God, what
balm the simple phrase introduced into Alba's heart! Her mother was about
to show her the note! Her joy was short-lived! The note remained where
the Countess had slipped it, after having nervously folded it, in the