t maddening appetite
to know the truth, which becomes, in certain forms of doubt, a physical
need, as imperious as hunger and thirst, and she listened to Florent's
sister, who continued:

"Will it be a proof when you have seen the affair written in her own
hand? Yes," she continued, with cruel irony, "she loves correspondence,
our fortunate rival. Justice must be rendered her that she may make no
more avowals. She writes as she feels. It seems that the successor was
jealous of his predecessor.... See, is this a proof this time?"....
And, after having glanced at the first letters as a person familiar with
them, she handed one of those papers to Maud, who had not the courage to
avert her eyes. What she saw written upon that sheet drew from her a cry
of anguish. She had, however, only read ten lines, which proved how
much mistaken psychological Dorsenne was in thinking that Maitland
was ignorant of the former relations between his mistress and Gorka.
Countess Steno's grandeur, that which made a courageous woman almost a
heroine in her passions, was an absolute sincerity and disgust for the
usual pettiness of flirtations. She would have disdained to deny to a
new lover the knowledge of her past, and the semiavowals, so common to
women, would have seemed to her a cowardice still worse. She had not
essayed to hide from Maitland what connection she had broken off for
him, and it was upon one of those phrases, in which she spoke of it
openly, that Madame Gorka's eyes fell:

"You will be pleased with me," she wrote, "and I shall no longer see in
your dear blue eyes which I kiss, as I love them, that gleam of mistrust
which troubles me. I have stopped the correspondence with Gorka. If you
require it, I will even break with Maud, notwithstanding the reason you
know of and which will render it difficult for me. But how can you be
jealous yet?... Is not my frankness with regard to that liaison the
surest guarantee that it is ended? Come, do not be jealous. Listen to
what I know so well, that I felt I loved, and that my life began only
on the day when you took me in your arms. The woman you have awakened in
me, no one has known--"

"She writes well, does she not?" said Lydia, with a gleam of savage
triumph in her eyes. "Do you believe me, now?... Do you see that we have
the same interest to-day, a common affront to avenge? And we will avenge
it.... Do you understand that you can not allow your husband to fight a
duel with my broth