ival and the suppressed rage of that rival--as
the finesse of Hafner in sustaining the general conversation--as the
assiduous attentions of Ardea to Fanny--as the emotion of the latter--as
clear as Alba's sense of relief. All those faces, on Boleslas's
entrance, had expressed different feelings. Only one had, for several
minutes, expressed the joy of crime and the avidity of ultimately
satisfied hatred. But as it was that of little Madame Maitland,
the silent creature, considered so constantly by him as stupid and
insignificant, Dorsenne had not paid more attention to it than had the
other witnesses the surprising reappearance of the betrayed lover.

Every country has a metaphor to express the idea that there is no
worse water than that which is stagnant. Still waters run deep, say the
English, and the Italians, Still waters ruin bridges.

These adages would not be accurate if one did not forget them in
practise, and the professional analyst of the feminine heart had
entirely forgotten them on that evening.

CHAPTER V. COUNTESS STENO

A woman less courageous than the Countess, less capable of looking a
situation in the face and of advancing to it, such an evening would
have marked the prelude to one of those nights of insomnia when the mind
exhausts in advance all the agonies of probable danger. Countess Steno
did not know what weakness and fear were.

A creature of energy and of action, who felt herself to be above all
danger, she attached no meaning to the word uneasiness. So she slept,
on the night which followed that soiree, a sleep as profound, as
refreshing, as if Gorka had never returned with vengeance in his heart,
with threats in his eyes. Toward ten o'clock the following morning,
she was in the tiny salon, or rather, the office adjoining her bedroom,
examining several accounts brought by one of her men of business. Rising
at seven o'clock, according to her custom, she had taken the cold bath
in which, in summer as well as winter, she daily quickened her blood.
She had breakfasted, 'a l'anglaise', following the rule to which she
claimed to owe the preservation of her digestion, upon eggs, cold meat,
and tea. She had made her complicated toilette, had visited her daughter
to ascertain how she had slept, had written five letters, for her
cosmopolitan salon compelled her to carry on an immense correspondence,
which radiated between Cairo and New York, St. Petersburg and Bombay,
taking in Munich, London,