piring. A second
shudder seized her as she was arranging the trifling objects, so keen, so
chilly, so that time that she paused. She lay there motionless, her eyes
fixed upon the water, whose undulations lapped the boat. At the last
moment she felt reenter her heart, not love of life, but love for her
mother. All the details of the events which would follow her suicide were
presented to her mind.

She saw herself plunging into the deep water which would close over her
head. Her suffering would be ended, but Madame Steno? She saw the
coachman growing uneasy over her absence, ringing at the door of Villa
Torlonia, the servants in search. The loosened boat would relate enough.
Would the Countess know that she had killed herself? Would she know the
cause of that desperate end? The terrible face of Lydia Maitland appeared
to the young girl. She comprehended that the woman hated her enemy too
much not to enlighten her with regard to the circumstances which had
preceded that suicide. The cry so simple and of a significance so
terrible: "You did it purposely!" returned to Alba's memory. She saw her
mother learning that her daughter had seen all. She had loved her so
much, that mother, she loved her so dearly still!

Then, as a third violent chill shook her from head to foot, Alba began to
think of another mode, and one as sure, of death without any one in the
world being able to suspect that it was voluntary. She recalled the fact
that she was in one of the most dreaded corners of the Roman Campagna;
that she had known persons carried off in a few days by the pernicious
fevers contracted in similar places, at that hour and in that season,
notably one of her friends, one of the Bonapartes living in Rome, who
came thither to hunt when overheated. If she were to try to catch that
same disease?.... And she took up the oars. When she felt her brow moist
with the second effort, she opened her bodice and her chemise, she
exposed her neck, her breast, her throat, and she lay down in the boat,
allowing the damp air to envelop, to caress, to chill her, inviting the
entrance into her blood of the fatal germs. How long did she remain thus,
half-unconscious, in the atmosphere more and more laden with miasma in
proportion as the sun sank? A cry made her rise and again take up the
oars. It was the coachman, who, not seeing her return, had descended from
the box and was hailing the boat at all hazards. When she stepped upon
the bank and when