whose apartments he had obtruded himself. He
pressed them. He gazed at him with feverish eyes, with eyes which had
not closed for hours, and he murmured, drawing the novelist into the
tiny salon:

"You have come, Julien, you are here! Ah, I thank you for having
answered my call at once! Let me look at you, for I am sure I have
a friend beside me, one in whom I can trust, with whom I can speak
frankly, upon whom I can depend. If this solitude had lasted much longer
I should have become mad."

Although Madame Steno's lover belonged to the class of excitable,
nervous people who exaggerate their feelings by an unconscious wildness
of tone and of manner, his face bore the traces of a trouble too deep
not to be startling.

Julien, who had seen him set out, three months before, so radiantly
handsome, was struck by the change which had taken place during such a
brief absence. He was the same Boleslas Gorka, that handsome man, that
admirable human animal, so refined and so strong, in which was embodied
centuries of aristocracy--the Counts de Gorka belong to the ancient
house of Lodzia, with which are connected so many illustrious
Polish families, the Opalenice-Opalenskis, the Bnin-Bninskis, the
Ponin-Poniniskis and many others--but his cheeks were sunken beneath his
long, brown beard, in which were glints of gold; his eyes were heavy as
if from wakeful nights, his nostrils were pinched and his face was pale.
The travel-stains upon his face accentuated the alteration.

Yet the native elegance of that face and form gave grace to his
lassitude. Boleslas, in the vigorous and supple maturity of his
thirty-four years, realized one of those types of manly beauty so
perfect that they resist the strongest tests. The excesses of emotion,
as those of libertinism, seem only to invest the man with a new
prestige; the fact is that the novelist's room, with its collection of
books, photographs, engravings, paintings and moldings, invested that
form, tortured by the bitter sufferings of passion, with a poesy to
which Dorsenne could not remain altogether insensible. The atmosphere,
impregnated with Russian tobacco and the bluish vapor which filled
the room, revealed in what manner the betrayed lover had diverted
his impatience, and in the centre of the writing-table a cup with a
bacchanal painted in red on a black ground, of which Julien was very
proud, contained the remains of about thirty cigarettes, thrown aside
almost as soon as lighted