she
had treated as calumny the slander of the world relative to a person
capable of such touching kindness of heart. And it was at that moment
that the false woman took Boleslas from her! A thousand details recurred
to her which at the time she had not understood; the sails of the two
lovers in the gondola, which she had not even thought of suspecting; a
visit which Boleslas had made to Piove and from which he only returned
the following day, giving as a pretext a missed train; words uttered
aside on the balcony of the Palais Steno at night, while she talked with
Alba. Yes, it was at Venice that their adultery began, before her who
had divined nothing, her whose heart was filled with inconsolable
regret for her lost darling! Ah, how could he? she moaned again, and the
visions multiplied.

In her mind were then opened all the windows which Gorka's perfidity
and the Countess's as well, had sealed with such care. She saw again
the months which followed their return to Rome, and that mode of life
so convenient for both. How often had she walked out with Alba, thus
freeing the mother and the husband from the only surveillance annoying
to them. What did the lovers do during those hours? How many times on
returning to the Palazzetto Doria had she found Catherine Steno in the
library, seated on the divan beside Boleslas, and she had not mistrusted
that the woman had come, during her absence, to embrace that man, to
talk to him of love, to give herself to him, without doubt, with the
charm of villainy and of danger! She remembered the episode of their
meeting at Bayreuth the previous summer, when she went to England alone
with her son, and when her husband undertook to conduct Alba and the
Countess from Rome to Bavaria. They had all met at Nuremberg. The
apartments of the hotel in which the meeting took place became again
very vivid in Maud's memory, with Madame Steno's bedroom adjoining that
of Boleslas's.

The vision of their caresses, enjoyed in the liberty of the night, while
innocent Alba slept near by, and when she rolled away in a carriage with
little Luc, drew from her this cry once more: "Ah, how could he!"....
And immediately that vision awoke in her the remembrance of her
husband's recent return. She saw him traversing Europe on the receipt
of an anonymous letter, to reach that woman's side twenty-four hours
sooner. What a proof of passion was the frenzy which had not allowed him
any longer to bear doubt and absenc